For the first time in years I was happy to go to work on Monday morning. I was up early after snatching only an hour or two of sleep in the wee hours of the morning, and I showered, dressed, and left as quietly as I could so as not to disturb anyone else in the house. I didn’t even peek in on Jacob before leaving, deciding that I couldn’t afford the sentimental luxury with what was likely facing me in the office that day.
Somewhere in the middle of the night I had become convinced that Bethany was going to quit on me. She was going to turn in her resignation, and might even make some kind of public scene, angry and dejected, both at the secrets we had shared and those that I had kept from her. I was at my desk in my tiny office long before anyone else arrived that morning, and I cringed each time I heard the elevator ding and a new gaggle of voices make their way onto our office floor.
I was hunched over my keyboard, pecking absently away at it when I finally heard Bethany’s voice -- not distantly as if just stepping off the elevator, but loud and present and in the very doorway of my office.
“All right, Alan,” she said, swiftly shutting my office door and perching herself on the edge of one of my plastic visitor chairs. “Now tell me. Tell me everything.”
I looked at her blankly, fear the only and overpowering emotion rushing through my veins. She was wearing a navy blazer over a white blouse, a big and beady necklace hanging tightly around her throat. But it was her eyes I noticed most, her bright and glaring eyes, filled with an incessant need.
“Everything?” I said, looking both ways to avoid whatever ambush lay waiting for me. “Everything about what?”
“About the interview!” she cried, as if I was the densest man she had ever met. “Where is it? What’s it for? When are they going to make you an offer?”
Oh. That.
I didn’t really want to tell Bethany about it. As I had already promised myself, I didn’t really want anything else to do with Bethany. But as I began to politely drip some innocent details of my adventure in Boston out to her, she responded with such eagerness, such willingness, and such desperation -- desperation, I realized, to imagine and vicariously experience something, anything better than the company we worked for -- that she pushed me completely off my guard. I had lost sleep thinking she was going to resign in anger, but I now began to realize that she might be thinking that I would be able to take her with me.
“So that’s it?” she said, after I had shared Steve’s parting words to me in the airport lounge. “They’re going to set-up another call with you? Have you heard from them yet?”
“Uh, no. It’s only Monday morning. Steve said his assistant would be reaching out to me sometime this week.”
“Steve,” Bethany said, somewhat dreamily. “It’s a good sign that you’re already on a first name basis with him. It sounds like he really respects you.”
Was I? On a first name basis? I was pretty sure that the next time I spoke to Steve I was going to call him Mister Anderson, but I decided not to share that with Bethany.
“Uh huh.”
There was a knock and I looked up and saw Gerald standing on the other side of my closed door. When he had my gaze he pointed at me and then held up five fingers, evidently wanting that many minutes of my time. I looked back at Bethany but she was turned around, also looking back at Gerald. Before I could say anything she was up and out of her chair.
She patted me on the hand. “Let’s get lunch together today,” she said sotto voce, standing over me, her hips and shoulders intentionally blocking Gerald’s view. “I want to hear a lot more than this.” And then she leaned in even closer, so close I thought she meant to kiss me. “I’m so excited for you,” she whispered instead.
And then she spun on her sensible heel. She opened the door and stepped aside to let Gerald into my small office.
“What are you two conspiring about?” Gerald asked, his voice unpleasant, but no more than normal.
“Secret stuff,” Bethany said playfully and left the office, closing my door behind her.
Gerald did not look amused. Nor did he take a seat, simply standing there and scowling at me through his eyeglasses. He seemed stiff, much stiffer than normal. Gerald typically had an uncaring nonchalance about him, as if he floated above the petty concerns of us mere mortals. Something was definitely up.
“What can I do for you, Gerald.”
“I wanted you to know that I’m planning to leave.”
I heard the words, but I had a hard time processing them.
“What?”
“The company. I’m planning to leave the company. Next week if we can make the proper arrangements.”
His words were clear, but I still wasn’t connecting the dots.
“Wait. What? You’re quitting?”
“Not exactly, but something like that. A lot depends on you.”
My heart sank, the import of what Gerald was saying suddenly made manifest there if not yet in my brain. I was already covering for Susan and Michael. How was I supposed to cover for Gerald, too? I’d never fucking sleep. And what would Mary say? She and Don already blamed me for driving Michael out of the organization. How well would they take another resignation on my senior team?
Gerald appeared to be waiting for me to say something, but I was too occupied with my own panicked reactions.
“Do you want to hear more?” he said eventually.
“More?” I said, pushing myself back from my desk, my chair making another gouging scrape on the wall behind me.
“Yes. When I go, I’m taking your client with me.”
That finally got my attention. I’m not sure how, but that particular combination of words just plucked me out of the sea of fear and worry I was drowning in and dropped me dry and clear-eyed on the deck on my own ship.
“What do you mean, you’re taking my client with you?”
“Just that,” Gerald said, still standing, and crossing his arms across his chest. “I’m hanging out my own shingle. I can run a business that runs circles around Mary Walton, and I’m going to prove it. I’m taking the biggest jewel out of her crown and building my own business with it.”
My thoughts were racing again, but this time the engine was my head instead of my heart. There were a lot of companies like the one we worked for out there, providing management services to non-profit and other organizations too small to manage themselves. It was not uncommon for smaller ones to splinter out of the larger ones, as the needs of the individual client organizations found themselves increasingly at odds with the needs of the growing management company that served them. Even what Gerald was suggesting was not unheard of; a client organization, dissatisfied with the minimal service it was receiving from an increasingly thin management structure, signing a deal with the person or the people it knows in the company for more dedicated and individualized service. But for something like that to happen, the client organization had to be dissatisfied, and as far as I knew the client both Gerald and I worked with was anything but. Mary’s entire focus was seeing to that. She was so much in bed with Eleanor, that I couldn’t imagine anything like what Gerald was talking about happening.
“Have you been talking to Eleanor?”
“No,” Gerald said, smiling devilishly. “Not Eleanor. Paul Webster.”
Paul Webster. The immediate past chair of the client organization’s board. The man with the gray hair and the blue suit that had questioned Mary and me about the circumstances of Susan’s and Michael’s resignations, and if we were responding appropriately to the staffing holes they left behind.
“He’s working on getting a majority of the board aligned with him. He wants to vote to cancel Mary’s contract at their next board meeting, and we need to be free and clear for the switch to be made.”
This was big. This was perhaps the biggest thing that had ever walked into my office, even if it had so far refused to take a seat. If more than half the board was in on such an action, then things had been in play for a very long time. Looking as shrewdly as I could at Gerald, I tried to remember all the times I had seen him in close and quiet conversation with members of the board. I always thought he was doing his job -- getting the leaders engaged in his department’s agenda. But now I re-imagined all those interactions with a different purpose in mind: selling them all on the idea that he could do the job better than Mary.
Wait a minute.
“Gerald, why are you telling me this?”
A look of pained exasperation passed over Gerald’s face. I could see him try unsuccessfully to stifle it, but it was there nonetheless.
“Because,” he said. “I want to take you with me.”
“You what?”
“I want to take you with me. I want you to quit your job here, too, and come work for me.”
No he didn’t. That much was obvious to me. He was saying the words, but he didn’t mean them, not in their entirety, at least. The pained look was still on his face, and for the first time he looked uncomfortable standing there in my tiny office in his pressed slacks and freshly ironed shirt.
“Gerald,” I said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
He looked at my plastic visitor chair, put a hand on its back, and then slowly lowered himself onto it. He did it without taking his eyes off of me, as if he was afraid that I might make some sudden move.
“Gerald,” I said again. “What’s really going on here? You don’t want me to go work with you. You hate me.”
Gerald looked honestly offended. “Alan! I don’t hate you. Why would you say such a thing?”
I thought back on all the times that Gerald had been dismissive of me and my authority -- throughout the length of our doomed staff qualities effort, for example, or, still very fresh in my mind, the time he had questioned my ability to lead in front of others in our staff office in Miami Beach. I was under no illusion. Gerald thought I was an inexperienced hack. Why would he want me to come work with him?
“All right,” I said. “Maybe you don’t hate me, but you’ve never thought too highly of my leadership abilities. You’ve made that clear. Why would you want me to come work for you?”
Gerald pursed his lips tightly. “Look, Alan, there’s no simple way to say this, and it’s probably not worth beating around the bush, so I’m just going to lay all my cards down on the table.”
I nodded and said nothing.
“Paul said there would be no deal unless I brought you along.”
It felt like I was back to not hearing him clearly.
“He said what?”
“Paul said there would be no deal -- that they would not break Mary’s contact and sign on with me unless you were part of my team. Once the separation is made, I plan to recruit a lot of Mary’s team away from her. We’re going to need them if we’re going to preserve the kind of continuity Paul is demanding. But there’s one person he won’t allow me to leave to chance. You. You need to be on board with this or there will be no deal.”
I looked at Gerald blankly, hearing, and understanding what he had said, but not entirely believing it. Me? Why would they want me?
Gerald quickly rose to his feet.
“Look, Alan. I realize now that I’ve approached this whole thing wrong with you. I want you on my team -- not just because Paul is demanding it, but because I think you will have a crucial role to play in the future of both organizations -- both mine and Paul’s. I should have led with that, and I regret that I didn’t. Why don’t we get together for lunch today -- somewhere away from the office -- and I can lay out my plans and make you the formal offer that you deserve. How does that sound?”
“Ummm. Okay.”
“Grand. Meet me at the elevators at noon. And please, keep all of this under your hat, at least until we’ve had a chance to discuss this over lunch. Will you promise me that?”
“Sure.”
Then Gerald smiled at me, a weak and flaccid thing that spread across his face like a stain of raspberry jam. He nodded, turned, and left my office without another word.
“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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