If I haven’t mentioned it before, it felt very much like things were accelerating on me. The meeting with Mary and Don had been a total mindfuck -- one wanted to fire me immediately and the other wanted to maybe fire me on Monday, and they decided by design or by dysfunction to have that argument with me in the room -- but I didn’t feel like I had any time to dwell on it, or even to prepare myself for its eventual, and inevitable, consequences. I remember talking to Jenny that night, while I was busily packing for Wes’s leadership meeting, first about the phone call with Steve Anderson, then about the meeting with Mary and Don.
“Do you really think Steve is going to offer you the job?”
I had the collar of a dress shirt tucked under my chin and I was folding its arms inward so I could better wedge it into my suitcase. “Yes. I mean, I think so.”
Jenny gave me a worried look. “Well, let’s hope so. You may find yourself out of a job on Monday. If not before.”
I tried to reassure her, knowing that anything was possible, but still pretty sure that I wasn’t going to get fired on Monday, and maybe not even then. I got the sickening sense that Mary wasn’t done sending me through the wringer yet, that she would never fire me, that she was trying to get me to quit by working me practically to death.
“Maybe you should start looking at houses in Boston?” I told her, trying to be cheerful, but checked by the tears that welled up in her eyes.
“Oh, Alan,” she said as she moved close and I put an arm around her shoulders. “How are we going to move to Boston? I feel like I’m going to drop this baby any day now.”
She was still a month or more from her due date, but I knew what she was talking about. A move to Boston with a pregnant wife or a newborn baby -- either way, it was going to be a challenge. It had already occurred to me that I might have to move to Boston and hole up in an extended stay hotel until all the difficult details could be worked out. But that, like a lot of other things going on at that time, seemed like too much to take on, too much to handle. When you’re running day-to-day, it’s hard to think about next year, next month, or even next week.
“It’ll be okay,” I told her, pulling her close, and feeling the solid weight of the baby pressed against my stomach. “We’ll figure it out.”
Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn’t. I didn’t have any idea. All I really knew was that I had to get on an airplane the following morning and help Mary manage what was likely going to be a raging tornado of a leadership meeting. As I lay in bed not sleeping that night, my mind was working double time on all the things that could go wrong and how I was likely to receive the blame for them.
But always there, running deep and dark like a sinister undercurrent to my thoughts, were the words that Mary had offered, telling me that it was Wes Howard -- Wes Howard! -- who had said favorable things about me, and that he was expecting to see me at his meeting. To praise me, I wondered? Was that what he had in mind for me? Was he going to give me a commendation? No, more likely he wanted me there so he could roast me in public.
I was still thinking about this when I met Mary at the airport the next morning. She was already at the gate when I arrived, and I was there at least an hour before departure. She was on her cell phone, sitting awkwardly hunched over on one of those airport bench-chairs, her body turned and twisted so that the charging cord on her phone could reach and connect to one of the few working and chronically over-used electrical outlets in the airport concourse. In the span of three seconds, she saw, recognized, acknowledged, and dismissed me, returning to the more critical discussion she was engaged in.
Sensing that she would want her privacy, I sat in a different section of the gate area, and immediately pulled a bulging file out of my briefcase. I had my own phone calls to make, coordinating more last-minute changes that Wes had left on my voicemail late the night before. I needed to talk to the venue, to some of the attendees, even to our keynote speaker. Some of it could have waited until we were together at the venue, but it would be better, I knew, to at least get some messages onto everyone’s voicemails.
I was still making those calls when my flight was called for boarding. Mary, flying first class, was able to queue up first, and as she walked by me in her business skirt and dragging her carry-on behind her, she offered me a few terse words.
“Good morning, Alan. See you in Denver.”
“Okay,” I said lamely, and it would turn out that those were the only words that we exchanged until our shared cab ride, on the ground in Colorado, as we were headed to the historic Brown Palace Hotel.
“Did you talk to Wes this morning?” she asked me, looking at me like I planned to panhandle her.
“No,” I said. “He left me a voicemail last night. I’m working on making his changes.”
Mary looked away from me and out the window. “Good,” she said, somewhat distantly. “There’s a lot riding on this meeting, you know. For him. And for you.”
“I know,” I said, looking at the back of her head.
When she didn’t turn back to me, or offer any other comment, like her, I turned and looked out my window. It had been a rainy morning in Denver, and the concrete was still wet as we moved off the freeway and onto the city streets.
This is so fucked up, I remember thinking to myself. She’s not even going to talk to me. She’s going to push me into the fire and stand silently by, watching me burn.
At the hotel we were too early to check into our rooms, so Mary planted herself in the lobby, quickly finding yet another often-abused electrical outlet and making more phone calls, and I went to meet with the conference service manager and make sure the meeting rooms for that evening’s opening dinner and tomorrow’s strategy session were being set correctly. I spent a few hours in the banquet room being set for our dinner, sitting at one of the yet-to-be-dressed rounds, doing what I could to prepare for the meeting.
Frankly, there wasn’t much more I could do. I had left my messages and a handful of those people called me back, confirming that they had received and would comply with their new instructions. Now, there really wasn’t anything to do until our attendees started showing up. Organizing these events was often like that. In the days leading up to the event there was always a frenzy of activity -- hundreds of tasks to complete and never enough time to complete them -- but once you got on the airplane and arrived at the venue, you typically spent a lot of your time sitting around waiting for something to happen. And usually, whatever happened at that point, it could only be bad.
Eventually, my sleeping room was ready, and I checked in, went upstairs, ordered some room service for lunch, unpacked my suitcase, and began ironing my shirts. It was a ritual I was well practiced at -- and a good use of the handful of slow hours that always existed before the rush of the meeting began. I was only going to be there for three days and two nights, and had packed accordingly. I had three dress shirts -- for that night, the following day, and the day after that, two pairs of dress slacks, and a single sport coat that would work with any combination of shirts and slacks. They all needed the careful attention of an iron after their journey in my suitcase and I lined them up on the bed and tackled them one by one.
As usual, lunch came to my door in the middle of this task, and I ate it sitting at the well-appointed desk that had been provided for the busy traveling professional. It was probably some kind of soup and salad combo -- I don’t remember what exactly -- but that’s traditionally what I ordered in situations like this. A chicken Caesar, or a Cobb (hold the blue cheese), with a cup of cream of broccoli or French onion soup, you know, the kind with the breadcrumbs soaked in the broth and the lid of crusted cheese over the top. Whatever it was, I ate it in silence, as I have a rule about never turning on the television when I’m traveling on business.
There is a kind of loneliness that comes when you’re by yourself in a hotel room, and I have always had an unhealthy obsession with it. Even in a place like the Brown Palace, or maybe especially in a place like that, you can look around at the wallpaper, at the soft goods, at the furniture standing solidly on the manicured carpeting, and you can sense all the souls that have been there before you and all the souls that will come after -- a long, uninterrupted chain of humanity, dating back and forwards decades if not centuries -- everyone with their own hopes and ambitions, but all sharing the same basic needs for shelter, for sanitation, for sustenance. Everything provided for you -- the bed linens, the bath towels, the room service -- they are all both unique and eternal. Like you, they will have their existence, but each in time will fade away and be replaced by something or someone else that serves the same purpose and comes to the same end.
These are the thoughts that would typically crowd in on me, and they probably explain why I hated being on the road so much. But after my lunch and after my ironing was finished I was able to put them all aside because it was time for me to dress in my work clothes and head down to the ballroom where that evening’s dinner would be held. It was still hours before any of the guests would arrive, but there were a lot of details to see to, and a lot of items to set up.
I had to get the boxes we had shipped in advance out of hotel storage and use their contents to set-up our registration table. For an event like our Annual Conference -- with thousands of attendees and hundreds of sessions, this was an elaborate process, requiring the work of dozens. For this leadership conference, it was similar but in miniature. The boxes we had shipped contained the name badges, ribbons, lanyards, and program books we would need to distribute to the various attendees, and they would need to be checked and doublechecked to make sure all the last-minute changes Wes had demanded had been incorporated.
I was deep into that task, my attention wholly consumed by making sure the badges I had made matched Wes’s final invite list, when a strange but familiar voice interrupted me.
“Hello, Alan.”
I looked up. Standing in front of my small table were two people. The first, the one who had not spoken, was Wes Howard, his unruly mop of brown hair framing his blazing and inquisitive eyes. The second, the one who had spoken, was a young woman, her hand clutched to the elbow crook of Wes’s left arm. She was young and thin and attractive, and I felt like I knew her but could not place her in my memory.
“Hello?” I said.
“Oh, come on, Alan,” Wes said. “You remember Amy, don’t you?”
The name was also familiar and the young woman looked at me like that clue should have been sufficient, but I was still not making the connection.
“Amy?”
She smiled and then I knew, the knowledge blooming in my brain like spores shooting off a fungus.
“He knows, Wes,” Amy said. “He’s just pretending to forget. But really, Alan, how could you possibly forget me?”
It was Amy Crawford, the woman Don had fired for her inappropriate behavior at a meeting much like this one, whose cackling laugh I had heard bellowing from the basement of Club NOW the night I had tried to rescue Caroline Abernathy, and now, here she was, standing before me, dressed in what appeared to be designer clothes, and hanging onto Wes Howard’s very arm.
“Amy,” I said with renewed confidence, working hard to mask the heart attack I was experiencing inside. “Of course, I remember. Just didn’t recognize you for a moment. How are you? You’re looking well.”
“I’m fine,” she said, extending her left hand as if I was supposed to kiss it. I would have been a fool to miss the size of the diamond on her ring finger. “How are you?”
“Okay,” I said, limply shaking her hand and then turning to Wes. “Are you two… Are you… ?”
Wes deliberately put his arm around Amy’s shoulders and pulled her close to him. The movement caused the neckline of her blouse to spread, revealing a healthy cleavage. “Are we what, Alan?”
I felt like a child, not having the words for what I wanted to say.
“Are you two … engaged?”
The word had magic. At its appearance Amy’s eyes seemed to light up and her face began to shine.
“Yes!” she said, jumping up and down in her excitement but held tight by the tether of Wes’s arm. “Isn’t it wonderful!” she said, extending her hand again, this time without any doubt as to her purpose of showcasing her ring. “Wes proposed last week while we were in the Bahamas.”
I looked at Wes, wondering which of the hundred of phone calls he had made to me had been done from the Bahamas. He looked back at me, smiling like a cat who had just eaten a pretty little songbird.
“It looks like you’re getting things in order, Alan, so we’ll leave you to your task,” he said to me, as if doing me a favor. “Just wanted to check-in and let you know we were here. Oh, and to make sure you can make room for Amy at our table tonight.”
“At our table?” I said.
“For dinner tonight. I think I may have neglected to mention that my fiancee would be accompanying me. We want to make sure that you’ll be able to provide a place setting for her at our table.”
I was nodding my head, understanding Wes’s intent long before he got to the end of his sentences. At dinner that night, there would be a lead table reserved, with its seats scrupulously assigned. Our current chair, our incoming chair, our keynote speaker, Mary Walton, me, and one or two other dignitaries. It wasn’t unusual for the spouse of the incoming Board chair to attend -- I remembered the dowdy and tired-looking man who had accompanied Eleanor Rumford last year -- but last I was aware, Wes Howard had been a confirmed bachelor.
“Of course,” I said, knowing there was nothing else I could possibly say. “It’ll be no trouble at all.”
“Super!” Amy said, as the pair turned to depart. She waved her jeweled hand at me with a backward glance. “It’ll be fun catching up!”
+ + +
“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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