Dragons - Part V

1

Have you ever been to Miami Beach?

Which one?

If you’ve been there only to attend a conference or convention, you may not have realized that there are actually two Miami Beaches. You may be very much like the volunteers in the nonprofit I managed. People like you and them, you fly into Miami -- or San Francisco, or Chicago, or wherever your national convention is being held, upgraded to first class, no doubt -- and you experience a city very different from the one people actually live in. From the limousine pickup at the airport to the chocolate-covered strawberries waiting in your hotel suite to the top shelf liquor served at the opening night reception on the hotel’s private portion of Miami’s famous beach -- or, I suppose, at the Museum of Modern Art if it’s San Francisco or the Signature Room at the top of the John Hancock Building if it’s Chicago -- you never get to see what’s really going on in the cities you visit, do you? Even though what’s really going on is often going on right there on the street in front of your four-star hotel, just a couple of stories below the crystal chandeliers hanging in the ballrooms where you hold your fundraising dinners and your professional education sessions.

Think I’m kidding? Look, I may not know much about being a father, but I do know about this. I was on the inside, remember? I’m the one who cut the deals with the man behind the curtain to make all the magic happen, who kept people like you in the dark about that other Miami Beach. It’s not all restaurants with dueling movie star chefs and all-night dance clubs filled with beautiful Cuban women and glowing high-rises and celebrity mansions along the Intracoastal Waterway. That’s just the image they put in your mind. That’s what they spend their millions on, making your brain conjure up those illusions whenever you think about Miami Beach, and convincing you it might be fun to go down there and add some of your money to their pot. But it isn’t real. Like every other city on earth there’s a real Miami on which that fantasy is built, where kids go to school and garbage gets picked up on Thursdays and people struggle to get ahead and some percentage of the population inevitably falls through the cracks.

On this trip to Miami, the juxtaposition of it all hit me really hard. Probably because of all the crap I was dealing with at home and at work. It’s never a good idea to travel when you don’t have a stable anchor to ground you.

The plane ride down was uneventful, giving me plenty of time to think about all the things that could go wrong in the week ahead. On a plane full of people I felt more or less alone, because no one from the office was flying with me. I was coming in a day earlier than I usually did, invited to make a special appearance at the board meeting because of my new role in the organization. I stopped in Memphis to change planes and checked my voicemail about a dozen times during the layover, certain that all kinds of hell was already breaking loose and that my mailbox would be filled with frantic messages from staff members and volunteers alike.

Alan, I missed my connection in Detroit. What should I do?

Alan, all the conference materials got shipped to Miami, Arizona, not Miami, Florida. What should we do?

Alan, I just checked in at the hotel and my room is completely unacceptable. What are you going to do?

But every time I checked there weren’t any messages, just the dry and unfriendly computer voice asking me if I would like to leave any. I didn’t trust it. I was positive the voicemail system was malfunctioning -- that the messages were, in fact, piling up on the server but that some computer gremlin was keeping them from getting delivered to my mailbox. I even called back to the office to check on the server status, and got a gruff and somewhat insulted Jurgis telling me to keep an eye on my own business and let him keep an eye on his.

It left me feeling disconnected. Things had been so busy for so long, and now here I was in the Memphis airport with nothing to do and no demands on me other than getting on the next flight. It was liberating and frightening at the same time. Part of me wondered what would happen if I never got on that second plane, if I just left the airport and drifted into the rhythm of that great Southern metropolis. I saw myself working by day as a tour guide at Graceland and spending my nights in the blues clubs down on Beale Street. Would anyone from my current life ever find me? Would any of them even try?

I wasn’t serious, just entertaining another dark fantasy, and when the time came I dutifully boarded the flight to Miami, squeezing myself into my coach seat and checking my voicemail one more time before they closed the boarding door.

The cab ride in from the airport is one of the best times to catch glimpses of that other city, the one the people in the mayor’s office and the convention and visitors bureau don’t necessarily want you to see. It’s hard enough for them to create a protective cocoon around their convention district. Blinding you from their blight for that entire trip is next to impossible. I always investigate the neighborhoods I’m likely to be taken through, wanting to know more about the real lives of the cities I visit. And, as expected, to get to my oceanfront hotel, the cab driver took me on freeways overlooking land-locked communities like Allapattah -- a name derived from the Seminole Indian word for alligator, now the home for mostly Dominican and Haitian immigrants -- and Liberty City -- named for one of the first low-income housing projects in the nation, where riots had once broken out over accusations of police brutality. These were places people are moved to and forgotten when expressways are being built and the dreams of developers are being realized.

This time I was by myself, but I’ve made such journeys with my colleagues and volunteers dozens of times before. For them, the twenty minutes in the taxi cab is always catch-up time -- talking on the cell phone with people who had left them messages or punching away on their Blackberry keyboards, trying to stay ahead of a never-ending string of email conversations. But for me these trips were a priceless reality check, an opportunity to stare out at the gritty circus that defined most people’s lives and try to put my own privileged existence into perspective.

Whether it was the strip clubs that lined every airport access road, the rusted and broken industrial buildings that surrounded every crumbling interchange, the graffiti-laden billboards for radio stations and beer that flanked every highway, or the boarded-up storefronts that seemed to wall off blocks of dilapidated houses -- the trip in from the airport was one giant reminder that the world is filled with haves and havenots. Some people ignore that fact, spending their cab time just watching the meter count up the dollars it will take to reach their destination. Others see the injustice but feel powerless to do anything about it, and fatalistically forget the divide by the time the bellman brings their bags up to their suite on the twenty-third floor.

The hotel I was staying in was nice. Real nice. I wasn’t in a suite and I wasn’t on the twenty-third floor, but it was the kind of hotel that had those kind of accommodations, and I knew several had been offered to our VIP volunteers. It was the headquarters hotel for our national convention, the one where we had reserved rooms at a discounted rate and where many of the conference sessions would be taking place. But it wasn’t good enough for Eleanor Rumford. As I dumped my luggage in my room and placed the do not disturb sign on the door before heading over to the board meeting, I remembered how Eleanor had asked us to reserve a special block of rooms for her and the board of directors at an even nicer hotel up the street. The service is so much better there, she had said, and we’ll have much more productive meetings with their conference concierge seeing to our needs.

“Yes, certainly,” I remember Mary saying when Eleanor had made the request at the end of one of our weekly conference calls. No equivocation at all, no caution that we would have to investigate the cost, that the budget may not support such an indulgence, that no incoming board chair had ever asked for such an extravagance before. Just “Yes, certainly,” and then a nod in my direction indicating that she wanted it taken care of, no questions asked. Of course it was me that had to convey the order to Angie Ferguson who, in the midst of planning six other meetings, would have to find time to negotiate a new contract with a new hotel, Eleanor breathing down her neck the entire time to make sure we got just the amenities she was looking for.

“The woman is insane,” Angie told me at one point. “She keeps going on and on about how this is the hotel she always stays in when she goes to Miami Beach, about how she gave her first presentation there, and about how it will always hold a special place in her heart. She wants me to get a certain board room for their meetings and a certain suite overlooking the ocean for her.”

“So?” I had said, not needing her testimony to convince me that Eleanor was crazy. All I knew was that Eleanor wanted it and Mary wanted her to have it. “Get it for her.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Alan.” Given the tone of her voice, she might as well have called me numb nuts. “We’re not doing any other business at that hotel, and they have another group in-house during our dates. They’re not interested in keeping us happy, they’ve already landed their big fish. I can give Eleanor anything she wants at our headquarters hotel. We’re going to fill all their sleeping rooms and do about a quarter million in catering there. For Christ's sake, if she wants the whole fucking spa to herself for the weekend, I can make that happen. But I’ve got no pull at that other hotel.”

“Do the best you can,” I had said, knowing there wasn’t much more I could say.

And Angie, using the almighty dollar and Mary’s blessing, got the hotel to release both the conference room and the suite Eleanor had wanted. As I walked the few blocks to the better hotel I could see the balconies coming off its tower -- the largest ones facing the ocean on the top few floors -- and I shook my head knowing how many thousands of dollars we were paying for the suite Eleanor was staying in, and hoping she was enjoying the view.

The main drag between the two hotels was another study in contrasts -- a reminder that the two Miamis existed even here. The east side of the street -- the ocean side -- was reserved for the over-leveraged high rises and hotels; million-dollar real estate gobbled up for their expansive infinity pools and beachside restaurants. Each complex squatted on an entire city block, lifting its luxury towers into the air so its windows could reflect the dazzling light of both the rising and setting sun. Between these giants sat squalid little swimwear and souvenir shops -- places where the paint was always peeling -- the kind of places the tourists who were staying in the fleabag hotels on the west side of the street would frequent when they ran out of suntan lotion or wanted to pick up a six-pack of beer, or a trinket or two for the kids to remember their Florida vacation by. Later in my trip, I knew, I would spend a few minutes in one of those dismal shops, looking for something to bring home to Jacob, and fully expecting to give up after finding nothing more meaningful than lucite snow globes filled with dolphins and glitter stars, and giant ballpoint pens with MIAMI BEACH stenciled in plastic appliqué down the side.

When I turned down the street where Eleanor’s hotel had hidden its entrance -- the truly best hotels always did that, tucking their main entrances down side streets and adorning them only with simple signs, like corporate law firms that don’t need to call attention to themselves -- a salty fresh sea breeze hit me in the face and I caught a glimpse of the sand of Miami Beach itself, a blue ribbon of ocean beckoning beyond. The great expanse of dreams and danger had always been a block away, but now I saw how the buildings -- and the hotels, always the hotels -- tried to keep it prisoner, as if such a thing could be corralled, and in their attempt only succeeded in keeping certain people from it. Eleanor’s hotel and the building opposite -- some kind of art deco condo monolith -- formed the walls of a white canyon, with a palm tree-lined street snaking its way between the cliffs and ending in a traffic turnabout and several concrete pylons. This configuration kept all but the most determined pedestrians from wandering out onto the finger-thin patch of public beach access that existed between the privacy fences, terraced decks, full service beach cabanas, and manicured sand that the Goliaths of this world used to parcel out the majesty of the unsounded sea, treating it like any other commodity to be hoarded and sold to the highest bidder.

Except these Goliaths weren’t feared and reviled like that ancient Philistine from the Bible story. Instead, they were where everyone wanted to be. The whole cavalcade of humanity was there -- from the American princesses with their silk beach wraps and their rhinestone-studded flip flops to the homeless men with soiled swim trunks and toenail fungus -- you could see them both by the dozens on the streets of Miami Beach, sometimes passing each other as if members of the same community, as if they had something more in common than just the desire for what only one of them could afford.

People are the same everywhere you go.  Bums asking for spare change, hotel doormen working double shifts to put their kids through college, trophy wives laying out on pool decks with their fake breasts and fashion magazines, and volunteer leaders gathering together in oak-paneled board rooms to make decisions on how to spend other people’s money. Whoever they are, if they go to Miami Beach they want the same thing. They want to be where it was happening, where they can lose themselves in the intoxication of knowing that they are a step ahead of someone else, that they have something someone else doesn’t and never will.

That, in fact, is why there are two Miami Beaches. As sad as it is to say, you can’t have one without the other.

2

I sat outside the room the board was meeting in for forty-five minutes. Well, I wasn’t actually sitting for most of that time; I was pacing, wondering what they were going to ask me and what tricks I’d have to perform for them.

I had never actually been to a board meeting before and didn’t know what to expect. The leadership conference Mary had taken me to earlier in the year to introduce me around had included a board meeting, but it had been more perfunctory than anything else -- two hours of parliamentary motions, amendments, and question calls whizzing by before my eyes like a swift-moving freight train. What was happening now was a very different affair -- a day and a half of environmental scanning, strategic conversations, and long-range planning prior to the start of our organization’s national conference. Decisions made here would be slow and deliberate, and they would reverberate throughout the year ahead as Mary worked to reshape the services we provided to align with the priorities and resource allocations selected by the board.

It was all very secretive. Mary liked it that way. Looking at the closed meeting room door I knew she was in there with them. She had come in two nights before -- her sleeping room guaranteed for late arrival at the same overpriced hotel Eleanor had wanted for herself -- and she had met with the board all day yesterday, and then taken them out for dinner at one of the best restaurants in town. Like Eleanor, no expense was spared when it came to the board’s itinerary, and Mary always included herself in their activities. My new position, as unique as it was, didn’t grant me access to their exclusive club. They would make most of their decisions without me, and it clearly wasn’t necessary for me to enjoy the same luxury accommodations they did.

But there was more to it than just where I sat in the pecking order. I’d done the math. My shorter itinerary and less-opulent housing were saving the organization more than eight hundred dollars in total -- almost enough to offset one night’s lodging in Eleanor’s suite. And there were other planned cutbacks in the conference budget, enough to make up the rest of the difference, and in places where the VIPs and other attendees were unlikely to notice. Mary had been very precise in her line-item vetoes. The staff and the vendors we worked with -- the people who actually made the conference happen -- we would take it on the chin. She knew we’d suck it up and perform the best we could -- our jobs depended on it. But ask the volunteers to give up one of their perks? Or ask the conference attendees to shoulder some piece of the burden? That was unthinkable.

When it was ten minutes past their scheduled break time, I stealthily approached the door and peeked through the little fish-eyed lens that allowed convention service staff to check on meetings inside without disturbing them. The most prominent feature I saw was the conference table itself -- a mahogany monstrosity with cherry wood inlays and electrical, phone, and internet jacks at every executive place setting. The people around the table seemed like afterthoughts, blurry figures shrunk down and widely separated from one another. Even with the distortion, however, I had no problem identifying Eleanor and Mary, two women sitting side by side at one end of the table, while fifteen other board members faced them, all men, their colorful ties slashing down their white shirts like open wounds. Pressing my ear against the door I struggled to hear what they were saying, but couldn’t make anything out.

I sat back down in the comfortable chair that had been placed opposite the board room door, an abstract painting and an ornate credenza with a house phone and a spread of daily newspapers forming a tasteful grouping for the executive with a few minutes to kill. After a while a banquet captain came by and placed a small tray with a bottle of spring water and a chilled glass with a wedge of lime on the credenza next to me. He was dark-complexioned and wore a short tuxedo jacket and a crisply pressed shirt.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Our compliments, sir,” he said. “In case you get thirsty while you wait.”

I looked at the bottle and then back at him, realizing I was thirsty, that I hadn’t had anything to drink since the eight ounces of Diet Coke on the plane from Memphis, and marveling at the idea that he had known that when I hadn’t. Damn, I thought, the service here was good.

“Thanks,” I said.

“A pleasure.” He nodded, and then moved off down the corridor.

I had only drunk half of the spring water when the board room door opened and one of the board members came darting out. I recognized him by the picture we had on our website -- now clearly ten or fifteen years out of date -- but couldn’t remember his name. He gave me a quick wave as I came up out of the chair, and then dashed down the hall and into the men’s room. He’d left the board room door open behind him, and I could see other members of the board inside rising from their chairs, stretching their arms, and joking good-naturedly with each other.

From my perspective I could see neither Mary nor Eleanor, but deciding they had finally gone on break -- twenty-five minutes late -- I ventured into the room, stopping just inside the door, the bright sunshine from a long bank of windows causing me to blink and momentarily shield my eyes. They weren’t just windows, I realized, but full glass doors, two of them slid open and I saw several board members out on a small tile-floored terrace beyond. An infinity of blue sky surrounded their solid forms.

“How was your flight?”

I turned to my right and there stood Mary, dressed in one of her power suits and looking more at home than I had ever seen her in the office.

“It was good,” I said, nodding the hello instead of vocalizing it.

“Any delays?”

“Nope. Smooth sailing, start to finish.”

“And your hotel?”

“It’s nice,” I said, wondering why all the small talk. “What I saw of it, at least. I just dropped my bags and left in order to get over here on time.” I saw Eleanor over Mary’s shoulder, in a conversation with another board member. She was also dressed professionally, her hair recently permed in a style no longer in fashion. “How are things here?”

“They’re nice. Eleanor is very happy with her suite.”

It wasn’t the information I was looking for. I was really asking about how the board meeting was going, but I decided not to clarify because I saw Eleanor break out of her conversation and turn towards us.

“Alan!” she said warmly, stepping forward and shaking my hand in both of hers. “It’s good to see you again. We’re all looking forward to your presentation this afternoon. It looks like another record-breaking conference. Congratulations!”

The effusiveness of her praise took me by surprise. It was true the written report I had submitted in advance of the board meeting had shown us on track to beat last year’s attendance record, but a lot still depended on the on-site registrations. I found myself mumbling something to that effect.

“No worries!” Eleanor said. “With all the hard work you’ve put into this conference, I’ve every confidence that the numbers will come in. It’s one of the few things we can count on this year, eh, Mary?”

Eleanor was still jovial, but Mary’s face paled as if she had been stabbed in the side with a letter opener. Mary’s flat response, I thought, was even more revealing.

“If you say so, Eleanor.”

It sounded nearly insubordinate to me, but if Eleanor thought so, she showed no outward signs. She gave me a smile and a reassuring squeeze on the elbow, and then moved on to another conversation.

“What was that all about?” I asked as soon as Eleanor was out of earshot.

“It’s nothing,” Mary said, her reptilian mask coming back down over her face. “Just stick to your script during your presentation. And during the question and answer period...” She left the sentence dangling, as if waiting for me to confirm that I was listening.

“Uh huh?”

She stepped closer to me, close enough for me to smell her perfume, closer than I was frankly comfortable with, and spoke without pretense.

“Don’t say anything. I’ll field all the questions and, no matter what I say -- don’t contradict me. Just keep your mouth shut. Understood?”

“Suuurrre,” I said slowly, knowing this was not the time to ask questions, but curious as all hell as to what was going on.

Mary’s hand came up as if to grasp me, to squeeze my arm as Eleanor had done, to communicate some kind of human feeling that existed below the surface of her words, but Mary’s hand stopped short, hovering in the air like a hawk before falling away. Then she moved past me, weaving around two other board members and out of the room.

3

“Thank you for that report, Alan,” Eleanor was saying twenty minutes later, after my presentation and with everyone reconvened around the board table. “Are there any questions?”

“Yes, I have one.”

It was Paul Webster, the new vice chair of the board, the man, I knew, that Eleanor would be handing the gavel to a year from now, just as she had been given the gavel by the now past chair of the board, all these terms by tradition beginning and ending at the start of the board meeting taking place at each Annual Conference. Other than that, I didn’t know him at all. I hardly knew anyone on the board. Mary kept them very well insulated from me and the rest of the staff. All I knew about Paul was what he looked like -- a gray-haired bureaucrat in a blue suit.

“Paul?” Eleanor said, acknowledging him as having the floor.

“It’s my understanding that two senior staff people have recently left the organization -- Susan Sanford and Michael Lopez. Both of whom had significant responsibilities associated with this conference.”

Paul paused, as if expecting me to affirm the truth of his statement. I kept my eyes on him, but could see Mary fidget in my peripheral vision, purposelessly lining up her pen with the top edge of her legal pad. As she had instructed, I held my tongue.

“What kind of contingency plans have been put in place to deal with their absence?”

There was no need for me to defer to Mary by word or gesture. She began speaking immediately, as if this was a play that had been rehearsed.

“We’re on top of it, Paul. Alan had been very engaged with Susan and Michael prior to their departures, and has been closely directing their staff since then. He’s done an excellent job preparing them for added responsibility here in Miami.”

Paul turned towards Mary, allowing me to look at her fully. “Did you bring any additional staff to help with the logistics?”

“Excuse me?” Mary said. She picked up her pen and began tapping it on the pad.

“You’re down two senior staff positions. It sounds like you have confidence in Alan’s ability to provide the appropriate direction in their absence. But what about feet on the ground? This is a big conference with a lot of details to coordinate. Have you brought any additional staff from that office of yours to help make sure things go smoothly?”

Good question, I thought, and then suppressed a smile as Mary’s eyes flicked towards me and I saw the momentary indignation burning there. I knew for a fact that we hadn’t -- that the travel, lodging, and meal costs associated with Susan and Michael’s attendance had been one of the items she had put on the chopping block to help make up the deficit created by Eleanor’s exorbitant needs. We had even discussed it. I had tried to take advantage of the opportunity Paul was describing, thinking I could have used one or two extra sets of helping hands, but Mary had swiftly vetoed it.

“We discussed it,” Mary said, looking now at Paul but tipping her head in my direction to indicate who ‘we’ was. “But finally decided against it. Alan believes we are adequately staffed, and I trust his judgment. He believes that any additional people we might have brought would have been too inexperienced with this meeting to be of much help.”

Paul turned back to me. “Is that true, Alan? There’s no one at the home office who could have helped?”

From across the table I could see Mary staring at me, as if mentally reinforcing her pre-meeting instructions. Don’t contradict me. Even when you’re telling outright lies, Mary? Is that really what you expect me to do?

“Alan?”

Bitch. Of course that’s what she expected me to do.

“That’s right, Paul,” I said with a smile that moved my lips but didn’t reach my eyes. “We have a lot of confidence in our existing staff to rise to the challenge. They’re ready for it. It’s going to be a great meeting.”

There wasn’t much more I could say, but I tried to add as much nuance to my words as I could. I wanted my tone to convey shades of additional meaning. To Paul and the other members of the board, I hoped the tinge of smarminess I had used would communicate that the decision not to bring additional staff had not been mine, that regardless of what Mary said now the decision had been hers and had been made over my objection. And to Mary, I hoped she would hear that I clearly knew what she was doing, that by positioning this decision as mine I knew she was setting me up to take the blame if anything went wrong. I couldn’t do anything about it. Open defiance in front of the board would have been suicide, and she knew it. So I’d muddle through and be the good little soldier, but I wanted her to know I was onto her game.

Whether either shaded message got through I was never able to tell.

“Excellent,” Eleanor said. “Are there any other questions?”

A few moments of silence passed, several board members looking my way but no one speaking up.

“Then thank you, Alan, for your report and for your efforts on behalf of our organization. You’re welcome to stay as we move on to our next agenda item...”

I nodded my head and listened as fifteen people turned pages in their agenda books. I burned a stare into the side of Mary’s face, but she refused to make eye contact with me.

4

When the board meeting was over Eleanor took me aside. There was a reception starting for them in twenty minutes, and then a dinner, and most everyone else was hustling out of there to freshen up beforehand.

“Do you have a minute, Alan? I want to show you something.”

“Of course,” I said hesitantly, noticing that Mary, too, had heard Eleanor’s request and was stopping her movement out of the room. We both closed in on Eleanor’s location at the head of the table.

Eleanor was rearranging the materials in the stack she had brought with her to the board meeting. Tucking her agenda packet under a three-ring binder, she pulled out a copy of our conference program and began flipping through it.

“I don’t want to make a big deal out of this,” she said as she zeroed in on a page and ran her finger along a line of text, “but I thought I should call it to your attention.”

I exchanged a worried glance with Mary and then looked down at what Eleanor was indicating. She was on page 173, and I read along as she spoke.

“This session is comprised of three distinct presentation segments.”

Eleanor looked up at me and for a moment I tried to feign ignorance, looking back at her like I didn’t understand what she was driving at. Her stare became even more severe, the way my mother’s often had when as a boy I tried to escape responsibility for some wrong I had done. Knowing there would be no use bluffing her, I changed my pose to one of supplication and asked her silently for forgiveness.

“Now, don’t worry,” Eleanor said reassuringly. “With everything else you’ve been dealing with, it’s not surprising that something like this should slip through. Let’s just hope no one else notices it.”

She said it with such seriousness that I almost laughed, as if she had just uncovered some state secret that had accidently been leaked to the enemy regime. What, I wondered, did she think would happen if someone else did notice it? Would they report us to the grammar police?

But Mary didn’t see any levity in the situation. “Thank you,” she said with a gravity that equaled Eleanor’s. “I can assure you that something like this will not happen again.”

And then Eleanor nodded magnanimously, closing the program book below us as if to signify the end of an ugly chapter. “It’s done and behind us, now,” she said solemnly. “Let’s not speak of it anymore.”

She smiled at me, a self-important and victorious thing, offered to me the way a general offers terms of surrender to a defeated foe. She had actually done it. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was. At some point since receiving her conference program two days ago she had gone through it to verify that every one of her three thousand meaningless changes had been made -- of course finding the one I had purposely ignored in my moment of feckless rebellion. When did she have the time? Was she some kind of cyborg or something that didn’t need to sleep?

I smiled back, but inside I was screaming.

5

“Stay,” Eleanor said. “Where are you going at this hour?”

It was a little after eight o’clock. I’d already had two drinks at the board’s reception, and they were just about to be seated in the private dining room of the hotel’s five-star restaurant. The chef had a special menu prepared. I had gone back and forth with Eleanor six times on the phone making sure the sommelier had the wine pairings just right. But Mary and I had agreed that I would not stay to enjoy it. I had duties elsewhere. Now I turned to her for help, not knowing how to respond when the board chair put up a fuss.

“Eleanor, they’re setting up the registration desk tonight,” Mary explained. “Alan needs to check-in and make sure everything is going smoothly. It opens first thing in the morning.”

“Oh, poo,” Eleanor said petulantly, swirling her wine and pouting like a little girl. “Aren’t there other people who can do that?”

No, I thought immediately. We didn’t send any extra people, remember? And the cost of my meal has already bought you another two hours in that suite of yours.

“There are other people working on it,” Mary said reassuringly. “But Alan needs to make sure things are on schedule.”

Eleanor looked unsatisfied with the explanation, but Mary rapidly switched gears.

“Besides, once the crew is finished setting up, Alan is taking them all out to dinner. Kind of a celebration for a job well done getting us ready for this conference.”

“Excellent!” Eleanor suddenly beamed, grasping me firmly by the hand. “Give them my personal regards, Alan. Everyone has done such a fine job. They deserve a night out before all our plans start coming together tomorrow. You’re taking them somewhere special, I hope?”

I had no idea where I was taking them. Until that moment I had made no plans to take anyone anywhere. I was pretty sure Mary wasn’t serious, just using the staff dinner as a handy excuse -- or a lie, another lie -- to get out of having to buy me a hundred and fifty dollar dinner. I gave her a questioning look and she confirmed my suspicion with a stern face and a shake of her head.

“Wherever they want to go, Eleanor,” I said, smiling. “For them, the sky’s the limit!”

6

Five minutes later I was leaving the hotel and turning back onto the main drag. All the talk about dinner had reminded me of how hungry I was, so I looked up and down the street to see if there were any nearby options. The burger joint or taco place I saw -- their lighted signs glowing brightly in the warm night air -- was all I probably had time for, but something else caught my eye. It was a bookstore; one of those national chains with a coffee shop and lots of comfy chairs inside. It seemed out of place among the surf and souvenir shops, and maybe that’s why it struck me. It made me think of the one back home at the neighborhood mall. I took Jacob there sometimes. It had an extensive children’s section on the second floor, and a wooden train table for the kids to play with while their parents picked out books they felt were age-appropriate and supportive of whatever brand of spiritual or ethical beliefs they ascribed to.

The thoughts occurred to me in a chain, one linked to the next like the magnetic couplings between the wooden train cars I knew I’d find inside. I had to bring something home for Jacob, and instead of sifting through mountains of plastic junk at the souvenir shops, I could get him a book -- maybe something like the picture search book we had looked at the night before I left, or something filled with other kinds of puzzles. It was such a compelling idea that I forgot momentarily about the burrito dinner calling my name, as well as the supervisory chore at the conference registration desk. I turned and started walking towards the bookstore with happy thoughts of Jacob and I working together on puzzles dancing in my head.

Inside the aroma of sand and surf gave way to coffee beans and bindery glue, a familiar scent that seemed to transport me, as if the sliding glass doors were a magical portal capable of transcending time and space. The decor was identical to the store back home; identical, I knew, to hundreds of other stores across the United States. Caricatures of famous authors were framed on the walls -- mostly nineteenth and early twentieth century, names everyone knows but no one reads -- looking down on a labyrinth of wooden tables and laminate shelves, each with a tasteful sign bearing some generic category of books -- subjects like history, fiction, and poetry squared off against weight loss, sports, and gardening, as if it was reasonable to put such topics on equal footing. It was filled with quiet people, shuffling between the rows and stealing a few paragraphs out of random tomes they had pulled off the shelves. In our modern world I suppose it was what passed for a temple, a cookie-cutter one, dedicated not to the sum of human knowledge but to the information people will pay $8.95 a title for, and only then if it’s on sale.

The children’s section was identical to the one I took Jacob to -- the train table surrounded by the same display of wooden toys, and the books organized both by subject and by age. I found the shelf stuffed with puzzle books and was overwhelmed by their sheer number. There were picture search books like Jacob’s on every subject imaginable, and hundreds of other options, from sticker books and coloring books to word searches and crossword puzzles.

It was bewildering. Maybe it was the drinks I had poured on my empty stomach, or the disorientation that always came with travel and lack of sleep, but I just couldn’t decide what to get. I wanted something challenging, something Jacob and I could do together, but not too challenging, something he wouldn’t shrink from, something that would nurture that inner genius I so desperately wanted him to reveal. Pulling out my cell phone, I decided to call back home and see what Jenny thought. The phone rang six times before it picked up.

“Yes? Hello? Who is it?” Jenny sounded breathless, as if she had run for the phone.

“Jenny?”

“Yes?” she said into the phone, and then, with her mouth away from the receiver, she barked at someone like a drill sergeant. “Put it down, mister! Right now!”

“Jenny?”

“Yes! Who is it?”

“It’s me, Alan. What’s going on?”

“Alan! It’s your goddamn son. He’s driving me out of my mind.”

“What is he--”

“Jacob! No! Oh my god!”

Then the phone must have fallen out of her hand because I heard the shuffling of fabric against the earpiece and a loud thump as it hit the floor. Jenny’s frantic shouting and Jacob’s screaming echoed in my ear as if from a great distance.

 

“Jenny!” I called into the phone, knowing she had left and couldn’t hear, but needing to say something all the same. Looking around to assess what kind of scene I would create if I started shouting, I lowered my voice only slightly. “Jenny, what the hell is going on?”

No response. I waited, the phone pressed hotly against my ear and a finger stuck in the opposite organ, straining hard to pick up every auditory clue. I was angry, viscerally so, but held it in check out of courtesy for the bookstore patrons surrounding me. Jenny’s final intelligible comment -- oh my god -- seemed to fill my world. It had been desperate, as if something not just frustrating but tragic had happened. My thoughts ran wild. Jacob was hurt, he had cut himself and was bleeding all over the floor. Or he had found some matches and had set the house on fire. Or he had hurt Jenny or the baby in some way, striking out in blind fury and hitting her in some tender spot. I couldn’t tell. The thumps, shrieks, and footfalls I heard weren’t enough to piece anything together, and here I was, two thousand miles away in a bookstore in Miami Beach.

What the fuck am I doing here? I thought absently, staring blankly at the puzzle books arrayed before me. Entertaining a pack of influentials while my real life was destroying itself back home? And for what? A paycheck? A career? A chance to do something important? Did any of that stuff even matter?

It was a long and frustrating wait for Jenny to come back on the line. I almost hung up twice, figuring she could call me back when the crisis had passed, but both times decided not to, afraid I would involuntarily hurl the phone against the wall. Instead, I closed my eyes and started counting the slow and measured breaths I forced myself to take.

“Alan? Are you still there?”

“Yes,” I said, with renewed calmness. “What happened?”

“It’s Jacob.”

“I know it’s Jacob.” I was a stone. At the bottom of a forgotten well. “What’s he done?”

“He’s wild, Alan. He’s out of control. He doesn’t listen to me when you’re not here.”

“Jenny,” I said measuredly. “What just happened? You dropped the phone and said, ‘oh my god.’ Is Jacob all right?”

“You need to talk to him, Alan. You need to make him listen to me.”

It was like she wasn’t even hearing me, like I was just the buzzing of an annoying insect in her ear. Every time I said something, she just spoke more loudly.

“Put him on.”

“He’s always like this when you travel. Something happens to him when you leave. It’s like he turns into a monster.”

“Okay. Let me talk to him.”

“Christ, he makes me so angry! It’s like he’s looking to cause trouble. He won’t do anything I tell him to do.”

“Jenny! Put him on and let me talk to him.”

“Here, just a minute.” And then with the phone away from her mouth, “Jacob! Come here and talk to your father!”

“No!” I heard Jacob say, as if curled up in the corner, a voice like the yip of a wild dog, raised on the streets and alleyways, subservient to nothing but its own need for dominance.

“You get over here right now, young man. You need to talk to your father.”

“I don’t want to!”

“I don’t care what you want, mister! You’re going to talk to him.”

Then I heard Jenny’s heavy tread across the room and when Jacob began to scream, I imagined her grabbing him by the arm and twisting it.

“Take this phone, Jacob! Take this phone and talk to him!”

“Jenny,” I said, a sickness creeping into my stomach. “Forget it, honey. I’ll call back later when he’s calmed down.”

She couldn’t hear me. The phone wasn’t even next to her ear. The way Jacob’s cries suddenly amplified, she must have been pushing the receiver against his face.

“Jenny,” I said helplessly, wanting to shout but knowing it wouldn’t do any good. Nothing I could do from that distance would have any positive effect. “Jenny, it’s all right.”

“Talk to him, goddammit! Or so help me, I’m throwing all your trains in the garbage!”

That must have got Jacob’s attention. Threatening his treasured possessions usually did.

“Hello, Daddy,” he said feebly, as if defeated.

“Hi, buddy,” I said as pleasantly as I could. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Why is Mommy upset?”

“What?”

“Why is Mommy upset?” I repeated, more loudly.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you do something to make her angry?”

“What?”

“I said, did you do something to make her angry?” Could he not hear me?

“No.”

He must have, I knew, but he wasn’t likely to tell me. He may not even know, I realized. Sometimes it seemed like cause and effect didn’t work in Jacob’s world, or at least like he had a faulty understanding as to how they were connected. The way he faced life, it was as if the good and bad things that happened were the capricious acts of a trickster god, wholly unconnected from his behavior in any way.

“You must have done something,” I coaxed, knowing that unless I figured out what he had done, there wasn’t any remote parenting I could do. “Why else would she be so angry?”

“Daddy?” A new tone in his voice, like he hadn’t heard me again and was starting his own line of inquiry.

I sighed. “Yeah, buddy?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Miami. I told you that yesterday.” Yesterday, right? It already felt like a month.

“When are you coming home?”

Now he was hard to hear. I closed my eyes and plugged a finger back into my free ear. “Not for a while, buddy. Not for a while. Can you be a good boy for Mommy while I’m gone?”

“What?”

I heard some static this time. “Can you be a good boy for Mommy?!”

“Uh huh.”

Was that a yes or a no? I wasn’t sure. “I really need you to. I need you to do what Mommy says. Can you do that for me, buddy?”

“Uh huh.”

It was the best I was going to get. I was just a tinny little voice in his ear. Ten minutes from now, would he even remember anything I said?

“I love you, buddy.”

“Okay. Bye!”

His farewell was said with the receiver falling away from his mouth, as if now that the obligatory conversation with Dad was over he could get back to the more serious business of tormenting his mother. The way his voice faded away I wondered if the ten-minute estimation I had just made wasn’t optimistic.

“What did you tell him?” It was Jenny, back on the phone and insistent.

“What?”

“Jacob,” she clarified. “What did you tell him?”

“What do you mean? I told him to behave.”

“That’s it? What about the way he’s treating me?”

“Jenny, I don’t know how he’s treating you. I’m in Miami, remember?”

“Go!” Jenny said suddenly, obviously to Jacob and not me. “Go play!”

“Jenny?”

“Jacob! Stop climbing on me! Go in the other room and play!”

Another rustle of fabric and a thump like the phone fell to the ground again. I heard Jacob cry and then launch into full-throated wails that faded as he either ran or was carried away. Then Jenny was hollering from far away, telling Jacob to stay put until Mommy was done, and then a door slamming as if the house was empty, and angry footfalls coming back to the phone.

“Alan? Alan! Are you still there?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, I am.”

“I really need you to talk to your son. Get him to stop acting this way.”

“Jenny,” I said with forced serenity, conscious again of the bookstore patrons around me. “I did just talk to him. I don’t know what you think I can accomplish from here.”

“Well, you have to do something. He won’t listen to me.”

And then the farcical enormity of it all struck me and pushed me over the edge. I flew into a rage. “Goddammit, Jenny! What the fuck do you expect me to do? I’m two thousand miles away in the children’s section of a goddamn Barnes and Noble, trying to mediate a dispute between a grown woman and a four-year-old boy.” My eye caught a teenage girl with orange hair on the other side of the bookshelf wrinkling her diamond-studded nose at me. I gave her a look like she was the one acting crazy. “And my cell phone keeps losing its goddamn signal. Can you even hear what I’m saying? You sure as fuck don’t act like it.”

“What did you say?”

I'd heard the static on the line during my tirade, but I had pushed right on through anyway. Now, I didn’t have the energy to repeat it.

“You’re just going to have to deal with him. There’s only so much I can do from here.”

“But I don’t know what I’m doing, Alan,” she said, a note of desperation coming into her voice. “He just won’t listen! Am I doing something wrong?”

“Lower your expectations,” I said glibly, like a radio show psychologist used to diagnosing problems over the air. “You’re both perfectionists and are bound to butt heads. When I’m not there, seek compromise instead of obedience. You may find what you’re fighting over has an easy solution if you each just give a little. You’re the adult. Take the high road.”

There was silence on the line. At first I thought the call had been dropped, but then I could hear Jacob’s muffled wailing echoing in the background and something else, much closer, like the coughing of an old carburetor.

“Jenny? Are you crying?”

Breath hitching in. “Y-y-yes...”

Oh, sweet Jesus, she’s crying. “Honey, don’t cry. What are you crying about?”

“I don’t know how to do this, Alan,” she confessed angrily. “I don’t know how to be his mother and now we’ve got a second one on the way.”

She sounded lost. At her wit’s end. Ready to give up. Part of me was angry, convinced that she had the far easier job between the two of us, but her misery touched me and I could feel my heart fluttering in my chest. I didn’t know what to say.

“Jenny… I’m sorry… but you’ve got to hold it together. I just got here. I can’t come home and help you with this.”

“I know.”

“Stop trying so hard. You’re his mother. He loves you -- more than me, anyway.”

“Oh, is it a contest now?”

It was a barb, meant to set us off into an argument, but I didn’t take the bait. “That’s not how I meant it. Just go easy with him. What are you two fighting about anyway?”

“It’s time for him to brush his teeth,” she said through her sniffles and tears.

I waited for more. “And?”

“And he doesn’t want to do it.”

“So? Skip it tonight.”

“Alan!” she said, as if I had suggested she cut off one of his fingers. “He has to brush his teeth!”

“Fine,” I said, switching gears and knowing the idea of not brushing your teeth before going to bed was as wild to Jenny as the idea of climbing into bed with muddy boots. “Then ask him when he wants to brush his teeth.”

“What?”

“Give him a choice. Brush your teeth before or after you put your pajamas on.”

“He’s already got his pajamas on.”

“Oh Christ, Jenny, I’m not going to playbook this one for you. Make him a deal. Let him decide when he brushes his teeth. Or sweeten the pot. Tell him after he brushes you’ll read him one of his favorite books. Just don’t order him to do something and expect immediate compliance. Nobody likes that. Especially not children with genes from you and me. Okay?”

“Okay.”

I felt like I was talking to a member of my staff. “Has he stopped crying yet?”

She paused, as if holding the phone away from her ear to listen. “I think so.”

“Good. Give him a few more minutes to calm down and then go in there a talk to him.” I paused, consciously softening my tone. “What about you? Are you all right?”

“I’ve stopped crying if that’s what you mean.”

I expected as much. Her acerbic tone had returned in full force. When she spoke I imagined her wiping a finger under each eye and looking up at the ceiling like she did when she was done crying and ready to move onto the next thing. “I love you, honey.”

“I love you, too.”

7

After hanging up I realized that my original reason for calling -- to get advice on the kind of puzzle book to get for Jacob -- had gone unanswered. I thought about calling back, but saw how late it was getting, and decided instead to get myself over to the registration desk. I left the bookstore without picking something up for my son.

The walk back to our conference hotel was a short one, the warm night air mixing pleasantly with a cool sea breeze and making me think of places I’d rather be. When I got to the hotel I marched right through the marble-pillared lobby and up a wide staircase, an immense sea mural of playful dolphins and ethereal jellyfish wrapping around the curving wall to my left and into the hotel’s dedicated convention space. Two ballrooms, fifteen breakout rooms, a grand concourse for receptions overlooking the ocean, and two dedicated registration desks -- everything decorated with the same seashell-shaped wall sconces, pearl-drop and oyster-shell chandeliers, and acres of teal and peach convention carpet, repeating the same interlocking design of starfish and coral to infinity. A group of our staff people were clustered in one of the registration spaces, their fingers combing through thousands of registration envelopes, alphabetized in a long buffet line of much-abused copy paper boxes. Standing off to one side, speaking softly to each other, like prison bosses worried about trouble on the chain gang, were Gerald and Bethany.

“How goes it here?” I asked, nodding a hello to each of them.

“Well, we’re getting there,” Bethany said, smiling like I had brought her an award for maintaining a positive attitude in the face of adversity. “It was a little dicey there for a while, but things are getting put straight now.”

“What?” I asked. “What happened?”

“The freight was late,” Gerald said. “The hotel had everything set for us this morning, but the boxes we shipped from the office weren’t here.”

I looked at the long line of cardboard boxes, dirty and battered from their long trip across the country. “When did they arrive?”

Gerald looked at his watch. “A little over two hours ago.”

“What?!” I cried, looking at my own watch. It was twenty minutes to nine. “What time did everyone get here this morning?”

“A little after eight,” Gerald said. He was smiling, too, but not in the way Bethany was. Bethany looked satisfied, as if pleased for finally getting a chaotic situation under control. But Gerald looked sardonically amused, like a professional auditor, whose job was to find the errors but not fix any of them.

I did the math in my head. “What did everyone do for ten hours?”

Gerald shrugged. “We drank a lot of coffee and took turns going to the can.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Bethany said quickly, obviously trying to soften the blow. “The computers were working, so we were able to make most of the changes and print all the corrected tickets. We’re just putting them all in the right packets now.”

I looked back at the row of people hunched over the row of boxes. They were all junior staff -- Caroline Abernathy and people like her -- and they were all combing through the misshapen envelopes into which we had stuffed each attendee’s name badge, ribbons, and session tickets. It was a system designed with the convenience of the attendee in mind. Stroll up to the registration desk, give us your name, and we’ll hand you a catalog-sized envelope with everything you need for the conference inside. It kept lines at the on-site registration desk to a minimum, but it required weeks worth of effort back in the office, weeks when hundreds if not thousands of changes to the registration records were coming in. Given the lead time necessary to create the envelopes -- or “reg packets,” as we called them -- there was never a time when we could just print the materials, stuff the envelopes, and be done with them. No, for the last few weeks before the conference we were running daily batches of corrected tickets and badges, and constantly going into the packets, loosely alphabetized in discarded copy paper boxes on long tables set up in our multi-purpose room, to remove old materials and insert new ones. The junior staff assigned to such thankless work usually developed a condition we called “packet finger,” nails and cuticles torn and sometimes bloodied by brushing repetitively by all the envelope flaps. Indeed, nearly every staff person now working feverishly to stuff the last remaining items before tomorrow’s grand opening had band-aids on at least one of their fingertips.

“Has anybody eaten anything?” I asked, trying not to calculate all the wasted staff hours.

“We had the hotel bring down some lunch around one o’clock,” Gerald said. “But no one’s had dinner yet.” 

“Should we go get some?” I asked quietly, remembering Mary’s lie to Eleanor about me taking the staff out for a celebratory dinner. I knew such a thing would never fly, that unless I took everybody to Burger King I could never get away with expensing such an extravagance. But it felt like I should do something.

“I think everybody here would just prefer to finish the job,” Bethany said. “I heard Caroline and a few of the others talking about going out afterwards, but I think most will want to get a quiet bite and then go to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”

Going out meant going to the bars and clubs -- probably a foolish thing to do on the night before the start of the convention, but I kept my mouth shut. I looked over at Caroline and her eyes flipped up momentarily, her fingers still walking through the ‘H’s below. Our eyes met briefly and she gave me a look I could only describe as equal parts apprehension and mistrust. I tried to silently reassure her, but she turned back down to her bandaged fingers.

“This is seriously fucked up, Alan.”

It was Gerald. He wasn’t angry, but his tone sought to make a point.

“I know,” I said, not taking my eyes off Caroline and remembering the way Don had humiliated her and made her cry.

“There are better ways to do this,” he went on, speaking softly but insistently. “There are vendors that handle this kind of thing -- registration for large conferences. Making our people do this is a waste of their talent and the client’s money.”

“I know,” I said again. He was right. This was stupid. Anyone standing here could see that. I had just arrived, but Gerald had been watching the madness for ten hours.

“Are you going to do something about it?”

It was a good question. I knew something certainly should be done about it, but I didn’t know what. I had talked to Mary about it before, and it seemed like this was the way she wanted things. A vendor couldn’t be trusted to get everything right. For some members this was the one interaction they had with staff all year. It was an essential part of the client service pledge we have made to the organization. Sitting in her palatial office surrounded by her stolen treasures these bogus reasons were persuasive, delivered, as they were, by all the force of her authority and with the veneer of character. They were obvious, incontrovertible, the very foundation of the business model that drove our success. But standing there looking at the human misery they caused, those reasons were empty, baseless, and cruel.

I didn’t immediately understand it -- this incongruity of thought that manifested with changes in time and place -- and wondered naively how I could explain it to Gerald when I couldn’t even explain it to myself. Too bad I hadn’t yet learned the simple rule that a boss was under no obligation to answer every question asked of him.

“I don’t know if I can.”

It was the truth, but sometimes the truth should keep its damn mouth shut. Gerald looked at me dismissively, his eyebrows lifting and his nose turning down so he could peer at me over the top of his designer eyewear.

“I see,” he said with a tone of profound disappointment, as if I had just failed some colossal test.

“What would you have me do, Gerald? You know where Mary stands on this.”

“Maybe you should bring her down here? Let her see for herself how ridiculous this all is.”

“She’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow will be too late,” he said bitterly. “By tomorrow everything she sees will convince her she is right.”

“Then what should I do?”

Gerald stood silently for a moment, an idea clearly creasing the corners of his eyes, but his lips wrestling with some unwillingness to share it.

“Tell them to stop,” he said eventually.

“What?”

“Tell them to stop. Let’s call it a night. Whatever still needs doing they can finish in the morning.”

I traded a look with Bethany, wanting confirmation that I had heard Gerald correctly and her assessment of how feasible such a suggestion was. Her doubtful look told me everything I needed to know.

“How much is there left to do?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” Gerald snapped.

“Of course it matters. If they’re almost done, they might as well finish.”

“They’re not almost done,” Gerald said quickly, as if he was making it up on the spot. “There are hours of work left to do. They could work all night and they wouldn’t finish it.”

I looked at Bethany again for the same kind of confirmation, and she gave me the same doubtful look.

“Does that change anything, Alan?” Gerald said. “Come on, call it a night. They’ve worked long enough.”

At the time I didn’t know what Gerald was trying to do. The nearest I could figure, he was worried about staff morale, that he thought working people all night long on such a menial task degraded them, and that maybe they would work better and harder in the morning if we showed them a little bit of our humanity tonight. But if so, then Gerald was clearly overplaying his hand, pretending there was an impossible amount of work left for them to do. Even I could see that there wasn’t, and at my side was Bethany, wordlessly and dutifully reinforcing my perspective. Muscling on through and getting it done seemed like the wiser course of action.

It was another rookie mistake. By that time I should have known not to take people like Gerald Krieger at their word.

“They’re almost finished,” I said. “Let’s pitch in and help them get it done.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Gerald said, throwing up his hands. “You do whatever you want. I’m out of here.”

He stormed away, making a huff loud enough for all the junior staff to hear. I looked over and saw a few brave heads peek up, but most of them kept their noses down in their work.

“What’s up his ass?” I asked Bethany under my breath.

She shook her head. “He’s been grumpy all day.”

“Well, whatever,” I said, dismissing Gerald from my mind. It had been a long day, and I figured I could give him till the morning to apologize. “Let’s go help them finish.”

“Okay, boss.”

8

We were there for another hour, Bethany and me, stuffing tickets and ribbons into envelopes with the rest of the junior staff members. We got some surprised looks when we first came over and asked how we could help, none of them likely suspecting that we’d ever do anything so far beneath our station. And I have to admit it felt odd, running counter as it did to Mary’s rigid hierarchy of tasks and the people meant to perform them. But at the same time it felt right, as if, by sharing their work, we were communicating something more clearly than words ever could, something much more meaningful than Gerald’s suggested gesture of letting them knock off early.

“What?” Caroline said when I first approached her. “You want what?”

“A stack of tickets,” I said. “Or ribbons. Whatever needs to be done.”

She looked at me blankly for several seconds, as if I was speaking a foreign language.

Bethany stepped forward and gently took a piece of paper out of her hand. “What’s this?” she asked, looking down at it. “The list of people that need VIP ribbons? Where are those?”

Caroline continued to stare at us silently, her eyes flitting between me and Bethany as if a single wrong word would plunge her into the abyss.

I took a stack of gold ribbons out of Caroline’s other hand, her warm fingers yielding and releasing them to my care without question. “These are them,” I said to Bethany, then, “we’ll finish with these,” to Caroline. “Go start on something else.”

She stood motionless, as if waiting for the miracle that had fallen out of the sky to sweep her off to the great beyond.

“Go on,” I said gently, the way you might talk to a child trying to ride a bike for the first time. “You can do it.”

Bethany and I worked side by side with the junior staff until the work was done and we could legitimately call it quits without anything extraordinary waiting for us in the morning. I felt strangely happy, picking my way through the envelopes and stuffing little ribbons and slips of paper inside, satisfied with the simple mechanics of the task and the way progress could be easily and objectively measured. To help keep my mind occupied I began to cogitate on some of the names I saw -- some of them familiar and some of them no -- members of the organization we served, thousands of them lined up in neat alphabetical order. They were from all over the world, dozens of nationalities equalized in large manila envelopes, their names printed on white labels in the upper right-hand corner.

Bethany was working next to me and at one point I elbowed her in the ribs.

“Look,” I said quietly, holding one of the envelopes so she could see the label. “Anastasia Amarosa. It’s kind of musical isn’t it?”

“Mmm mmm,” she said in assent. “I know her. She serves on one of our grant review committees. She’s nice.”

“What about this one?” I said, pulling out an envelope I had seen a few minutes ago. “Mert Aassen. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“That’s not musical at all. Mert Aassen. That sounds like something you need to cook really well before you eat it.”

Bethany laughed, doing the best she could to hide it behind her hand.

“What about this one?”

I looked up. One of the junior staff farther on down the row had spoken. His name was Jeff Hatchler. He worked for Angie, I think. A couple of other staff looked horrified, aghast probably that he had dared intrude on a private conversation between two of the bosses, but Jeff was smiling in his gap-toothed way, like we were all in this together.

He held up an envelope. Knowing he was too far away for anyone to read the label, he spoke as if announcing someone at court.

“Surender Viswani. Isn’t that what the Wicked Witch of the West wrote in the sky over Emerald City?”

There was some stifled laughter amongst the group, more nervous than genuine.

I reacted instinctively. “That’s nothing,” I said, moving down the row and clawing for an envelope I had seen while stuffing committee chair ribbons. When I found it, I held it up just as Jeff had done.

“I think this is the new Wookie ambassador in the Imperial Senate -- Karnen Baratawidjaja.”

The laughter was more genuine now.

But Jeff was not the kind of guy to be outdone. I could see it in his eyes, a relentless mirth that itched to infect everything he did, including something as soul-sucking as stuffing reg packets in the air-conditioned concourse of a Miami Beach hotel.

“This one needs no introduction,” he said, as he held up yet another envelope. “Bengt Weeke.”

“Bent Weekie?” I said, before he could tack on his own joke. “That reminds me of something that happened on my honeymoon.”

The laughter was slow in coming on that one, but my delivery was ribald, and as my meaning became clear the snorts and guffaws that followed were no longer polite, but deep and heartfelt. They were all laughing, I saw, or smiling at least; Caroline also staring at me with disbelieving eyes. It certainly wasn’t the kind of crack a supervisor should make, I realized retrospectively, but it was out and no one seemed offended by it. Besides, after the day I’d had, I didn’t much care.

“I always knew there was something crooked about you,” Jeff said good-naturedly, as if we were partners in a vaudeville act.

9

After all the work was done and we had thanked and dismissed the staff for the night, Bethany and I went and grabbed a bite to eat. We didn’t go out like we knew a few of the younger staff were -- Jeff and Caroline among them -- but stayed at the hotel and got a table on the terrace overlooking the ocean. It was close to ten P.M., and we could see the lights of the hotels and condos up and down the beach and the moon and stars in the sky above, but the ocean was a dark and invisible mass, the sounds of the waves rolling forward but only their foamy crests visible in the moonlight. It was late and we were ready to unwind. We ordered a couple of tropical mai tais -- a drink for tourists for sure, with goofy little umbrellas and giant wedges of pineapple -- the appetizer sampler, and an entree salad to share.

We talked about work for a while, things we had done and had yet to do to prepare for the conference. When there was a lull, and after the waiter brought us our second round of drinks, Bethany changed the subject.

“So how’d it go at the board meeting today?”

The board meeting? I remember thinking distantly to myself. Had I been to a board meeting that day?

“What?”

“The board meeting,” Bethany repeated, as if speaking to a moron. “Didn’t you give your report to the board earlier today?”

“Yes,” I said, deciding I had, and confirming it both for her and for myself. “Yes, I did.”

Bethany waited for me to go on. “Well...? How’d it go?”

“Fine,” I said slowly, my brain waking up, and realizing it was uncertain about how much I should share. “It went fine.”

“I hope they realize how much work we’ve put into organizing this conference,” she said pointedly. “You most of all.”

“Mmm mmm,” I said noncommittally, moving the umbrella out of the way and taking a slurp of my mai tai.

“What does that mean? Do they know how hard it’s been or not?”

“Not really,” I said easily, putting my glass down. “They seemed more interested in the bottom line. How many people we had attending. How much money we were likely to make. Stuff like that.”

“Well, that sucks,” she said, taking her own drink and rattling the ice in the bottom of the glass. “With Susan and Michael gone, you’ve bent over backwards to keep this stupid thing on track. We all have. Seems like that should at least be recognized.”

I shrugged, a little surprised by her tone, but not upset about it. There was more I could’ve said, and maybe that’s what she was fishing for. There was Paul’s question about being short-staffed and the lie Mary had made me tell, but I knew better than to share details like that with her. What happened at the board table stayed at the board table. It was a rule that didn’t have to be written down. It was partly the mystique Mary wanted to create about what happened behind that closed door, but it was also an important survival strategy. Having reached a position where I was now invited to attend board meetings, it would be suicide to start telling tales out of school.

“I’m sorry,” Bethany said, probably realizing she sounded more bitter than she wanted to.

I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it,” I said with compassion, and then with stoic resignation, “Ours is not to reason why.”

Bethany smiled, but not in a knowing way, and I wondered what she would think about the second line of that couplet.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I said, reaching again for the mai tai.

“Did Mary try to sabotage you?”

She startled me with the question, her lips still smiling, but her voice dripping with venom. It seemed both to come out of left field and to be strangely prescient.

I put the glass down without taking a sip. “What?”

“Mary,” she said slowly. “Did she sabotage you? Did she undercut you and try to make you look foolish in front of the board?”

I looked around at the handful of other patrons on the terrace. I didn’t recognize any of them but, for all I knew, they were all people attending our conference.

“Because that’s what she does. She’s a jackal. She sets people up to fail. You of all people must know that.”  

“Bethany,” I said. “This isn’t a conversation we should have here.”

She sat there smugly, her arms crossed across under her breasts, not caring, challenging me to contradict her, here and now, to try and prove her wrong. Her nostrils flared while a sea breeze came in and lifted her dark hair off her shoulders.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said suddenly, surprising myself as much as her.

“A walk?”

“Sure. A walk on the beach. Do you want to? It’s a beautiful night, and with the week we have ahead of us, it might be the last chance we get.” I paused, meeting her eyes without fear. “And we can talk more freely out there.”

“Okay, sure,” she said, now with comprehension. “That would be nice.”

10

We left our shoes at the bottom of the wooden staircase that led down from the hotel pool deck to the beach. Bethany stood waiting, wiggling her red-painted toenails in the sand as I tucked my socks into my shoes. I even rolled up my pant legs, expecting that we would spend some time walking in the shallow surf. The hem of Bethany’s business skirt, three inches below her knee in full compliance with the company dress code, would certainly pose no problem.

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 meaningless 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, her movements consisting 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 spoken to Bethany made me wonder how long she 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 jeez, 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, as the phone continued to ring.

“It’s my wife.”

“Do you want to answer it?”

No. “I probably should.”

“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.

11

“Hello?”

“Well, he’s finally to bed.”

I looked at my watch. It was almost eleven, more than three hours since Jenny and I had last spoke.

“Jacob?”

“Yes, Jacob. Your little trick worked. I let him calm down and then let him choose.”

“Did he brush his teeth?” In some ways it was like no time had passed at all.

“Yes. I let him pick which toothpaste to use. We opened the new tube I just bought at the pharmacy. It was a new flavor and he really liked it.”

Bethany had turned her head away, as if to give me some measure of privacy, but I didn’t want it. I reached out and grabbed her hand, forcing her to turn back and look at me.

“I’m glad.”

“Where are you?” Jenny asked. “I think I can hear the ocean.”

I smiled at Bethany. “I’m taking a walk on the beach,” I said, and she smiled back, exactly like we were sharing a secret. 

“Nice. Throw a stone in the ocean for me.”

“It was a long day. I thought I’d try to clear my head a little before going up to bed. I’m nearly back to my hotel now.” It was fun, in a way. These lies. That’s what they were, right? Lies? They didn’t feel like lies the way they rolled off my tongue.

“Well, I’m tired, too. I was just calling because I forgot to tell you something earlier.”

“What’s that?” I said, giving Bethany’s hand a squeeze.

“Quest Partners called. They want to set-up an in-person interview.”

“What?” I said, suddenly pulling my hand away from Bethany’s and switching the phone to the other side of my head. “When?”

“This afternoon. I tried to call your cell but you must have been in the air. And then tonight with Jacob it slipped my mind.”

“No, when do they want to set-up the--” I stopped suddenly, realizing that I may not want to reveal to Bethany that I was interviewing. “When do they want to meet?”

“As soon as you’re able,” Jenny said. “They seem really interested in meeting you in person. I told them you were traveling on business and wouldn’t be back until late next week. But you should call them tomorrow if you can.”

Bethany was looking at me with great concern, and I could only imagine what she might be thinking. I tried to dismiss her with a quick shake of my head and fluttering hand. “Who? Call who?” I said intently into the phone.

“Pamela Thornsby. The woman you already spoke to. Do you have her number?”

“Yes...” I said, my free hand unconsciously patting myself down as if I would turn up Pamela’s number in one of my pockets. I had blown the phone interview with her. I was absolutely certain I had. Now she wanted a second, in-person interview. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. “Yes, I do. I’ll call her.”

“Good. If you get the chance, call me and let me know how it goes. I told you I had a good feeling about this one.”

“Okay.”

“Good night, honey. I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I said it distantly, the phone folding shut as it fell away from my face.

12

“Is everything all right?”

Shit, I was thinking. An in-person interview. That means I’ll have to find time to fly to Boston. Unless they were planning to send someone out to meet me. That would be more convenient, but what are the odds of that? Will they at least pay my plane fare?

“Alan,” Bethany said. “Is everything all right?”

“What?”

“You look like you just got some bad news. Is everything all right at home?”

“Yeah,” I said quickly. “It’s fine. It’s nothing.”

“Is it Jacob?” she said, clearly not believing me. “Is he sick?” 

I forced myself into the moment, thrusting my wayward thoughts aside. “No, he’s fine,” I said reassuringly. “It’s nothing, really. Just some everyday bullshit. I’m sorry it interrupted our conversation. Where were we?”

Bethany looked at me searchingly, perhaps wanting to move on, perhaps not. Then she looked down. “I was embarrassing myself in front of you,” she said. “Telling you all kinds of things I shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?” I said, genuinely surprised.

“Like all that business with Mary. I shouldn’t have told you that. She’s your boss.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” I asked, sensing a change, and wanting to rekindle the connection that had evidently been lost. “She treated you like shit. She treats everyone like shit. It’s okay. You can say it. It’s just you, me, and the ocean out here.”

She smiled and then gave me a look, a look like I hadn’t seen in a long time, something that took me back to a time when Jenny and I were dating. It was nice, but awkward, and we both had to look away.

“And then I cried in front of you,” she said with gentle annoyance. “Of all the monumentally stupid things to do, a woman crying in front of her male boss has got to be at the top of the list. I can only imagine what you think of me.”

I felt the whirlpool of my worldly thoughts draining away as I realized she was doing that thing women do when they want you to reassure them, to come to their rescue. Sometimes that meant they were flirting with you, and the realization that Bethany might be flirting with me -- that she had recognized my half-hearted overtures and had decided to respond in kind -- it seemed to transport me. It was tantalizing, the idea that here, amidst the reminders of all the roles we were forced and we forced ourselves to play -- husbands and wives, supervisors and employees -- it was tantalizing that she still wanted me to think about playing one more, tantalizing and frightening at the same time. I wondered wildly how to respond, suddenly unsure if I wanted things to progress or not. In such situations, I knew, there were things you could say to shut it down, to clearly communicate that you weren’t interested, and there were other things you could say to unequivocally drive it forward, and still other things that were coy and playful, not undeniably leading anywhere, but keeping the door open and both players in the game.

“I don’t think any less of you,” I said, meaning every word but at the same time conscious of how scripted I sounded.

“You’re just saying that.”

“No,” I said. “Really,” feeling the indignation as if it was real. “You didn’t know what she was. You needed some advice and went there in good faith.”

She nodded her head ruefully, as if knowing I was right, but unable to accept it. “But I haven’t told you the worst of it. The part that makes me really upset.”

I waited the requisite number of seconds. “I’m listening.”

She settled back on her hands, her strong calves and bare feet dangling off the ledge and her white blouse glowing in the moonlight. Was she arching her back? Or just stretching?

“How does Jenny like staying at home with Jacob?”

I remembered the phone call from earlier that evening and the way it had made me feel isolated and impotent, and I realized that this conversation, this script no one had written but everyone knew by heart, would probably end at the same destination. I suddenly wanted to derail it. I wanted something, but not this. Maybe it was the sea air. Maybe it was the kind of day I’d had, starting in one time and place and ending in another. Maybe I was just sick of pretending, of play-acting, of trouble-shooting other people’s problems as if I knew how to fix everything.

“She hates it,” I said. “She can’t handle it. I called home earlier tonight and caught the two of them in the middle of a battle royal. I had to talk them both off the ledge. If I hadn’t called, I think Jenny would have wound up hurting him.”

It was a stark confession, but it fell effortlessly off my lips, and felt good doing so. These things were true, weren’t they? Sometimes you had to say them out loud to really be sure.

“Maybe Jenny and I should change places.”

She said it flippantly, giving me enough latitude to take whichever meaning I preferred. I looked at her and our eyes locked. Are you still flirting with me? I sent silently. I’ve dropped my façade. Will you?

Slowly she nodded, lowering her eyes as if unsure of her footing in this new territory.

“What I mean is I’m thinking about quitting and staying home with Parker.”

“You are?”

“I am,” she said, her words starting to flow more easily. “It’s taken me a while, but I’m finally beginning to realize that Mary wasn’t just rude, she was manipulating me. She manipulates everyone. She gets you to do what she wants by making you second-guess your own instincts. I was struggling, and she knew it. God was telling me to stay home with my baby, but I didn’t want to listen.”

Oh, fuck. God.

“Don’t look at me that way, Alan. He’s real, you know, and sometimes He tries to tell you things. But you have to listen, and I wasn’t. I was so focused on trying to be something I’m not, something I thought I wanted to be, that I couldn’t hear Him even though He was talking directly to me.”

I held my tongue. Bethany and I didn’t see eye to eye on God, but we didn’t have to. He was part of who she was, and if we were going to walk together on this beach, I was going to have to accept that and not judge her.

“Look, it doesn’t matter. What matters is Mary played me, and I came back to work after Parker was born just like she wanted. By reacting the way she did, by treating my pregnancy with so much disgust, she made me think that’s how all professional women felt, that all successful women dumped their kids in daycare and got back to work as soon as they could. If that’s what I wanted to be, that was what I was going to have to do. She didn’t even have to convince me. Just looking at me the way she did, I couldn’t imagine it any other way.”

As I listened, letting go of my expectations of her, it became clear that all our scripts truly had been left behind, and I found a new exhilaration absent the fear that had accompanied the previous one. Boss and employee, husband and wife, father and mother -- we had not only dropped all of our existing roles, importantly we had failed to pick up the new one we had been toying with, not wanting it, not even for the frivolous thrill play-acting it would bring. Out here, alone and in the presence of infinity, we had become just two people talking honestly with each other, all of our pretense left at the foot of the wooden hotel stairs with our shoes.

“And now you feel differently,” I said.

“God, yes,” Bethany said, her eyes tearing up again. 

I held out my arm. It felt honest and natural. And Bethany accepted it in the same spirit, scooting over to nestle in next to me, her head in the crook of my shoulder. 

“It’s okay,” I said, squeezing her warmly. “You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be. Not for David, not for Mary, not even for me.”

She touched my thigh, but there was nothing provocative about it, and it did not arouse me. It was just a human touch, her inner need silently matching mine, desperate for the non-judgmental connection it seemed only we could offer each other. On our beach that night there was no history and no presumptions, just two people who had found each other lost in the same maze. In a few minutes, I knew, we’d get up and resume our independent searches for the way out, but for that moment, for that endless and fleeting now, we blissfully shared the simple understanding that neither one of us had built the damn thing -- at least not intentionally. 

She sighed heavily. “Why are things so difficult?”

I shook my head, my chin brushing through her hair, the fresh smell of it filling my nostrils. “I don’t know, Bethany.” I said soothingly, almost adding, I wish I did, but holding it back. The waves came crashing in, and I felt comfortably lost in the limitless possibilities of life.

13

I was leaning up against the wall of the beach hut, my arm wrapped around Bethany and my thoughts a million miles away, when my phone started ringing. I didn’t want to answer it. I didn’t want anything to disturb this moment of serenity. It was stolen, sure, it didn’t belong to me, it didn’t belong to either of us, but somehow we had found it and made it real. I closed my eyes and tried to will the phone to be silent.

On the third ring, Bethany, whose ear was a lot closer to the noise than mine was, fished a slender hand into my pants pocket and used her nimble fingers to extract it from its cotton cocoon. I felt her probing in places she may not have intended and it sent a shiver up my spine.

Bethany held the phone up for us both to see, its tiny screen glowing brightly in the dark night.

“It’s Caroline,” she said aloud.

“Who?” I asked, my mind still not willing to connect the dots of my actual existence.

“Caroline Abernathy,” Bethany said, and began moving as if she meant to answer the phone, but held it higher for me to take instead.

“Hello?” I said sleepily, pressing the phone against my ear.

“Alan?!”

There was a frantic tone in Caroline’s voice, and she was shouting to make herself heard over some pulsating dance music.

“Yes?”

“Oh my god, Alan! Where are you? I need you to come get me. Will you please come get me?”

Now there was more than frenzy in her voice, there was fear, and it snapped me back to reality. I sat quickly forward, withdrawing my arm from around Bethany’s waist, and pushing her unconsciously aside.

“Where are you?” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know where I am!” Caroline screamed in my ear. “At some club, they dragged me here, I didn’t want to come, and now I want to go home!”

Caroline was incoherent, her voice loud enough for Bethany to hear it, and now she looked at me with great worry and concern.

“Caroline,” I said as calmly as I could. “Slow down. Where are you?”

“I tell you … I don’t know … where I am!”

She was crying now, full throated sobs punctuating her speech.

“Ask someone,” I said insistently, fearing that she was in trouble, and feeling, surreally, like it was Jacob that I needed to rescue.

“What?!”

No, not Jacob. Crazy Horse. My unborn daughter. But she wasn’t in any danger, was she? She was still safe in her mother’s womb.

“Isn’t there someone you can ask? A bartender? Find out where you are and we’ll come get you.”

“Oh!” Caroline said long before I finished, probably missing my slanted reference to Bethany being with me. “Right! Hold on!”

The club noise got louder as the phone fell away from her face, and I could faintly hear her screaming her question to someone nearby.

“Is she all right?” Bethany asked me during the pause.

“I don’t know,” I replied, not having time for anything else before Caroline was back on the line, her voice hot, desperate, and lost.

“It’s called Club NOW. Club NOW! Do you know where that is?”

“I’ll find it,” I said, being sure to use the right pronoun this time. “Just stay put until I get there.” I quickly calculated the time it would take us to get off the beach, flag down a cab, and get to the place where all the nightclubs were. “Give me twenty minutes.”

“Can you hurry? Please, Alan.”

“Are you all right?” I asked her pointedly, worried about the abject tone in her voice.

“Just hurry, please. I really need to get out of here.”

14

By the time we got there it was closer to thirty minutes later. And it definitely was we. Despite the bet-hedging I tried to do on the phone with Caroline, I never even considered asking Bethany not to come with me.

Club NOW was not at all what I expected. No line to get in. No cover charge. No dance floor with neon uplights. No beautiful Cuban women. It did have the pulsating dance music that had drowned out my conversation with Caroline, but with its oak paneling, worn carpeting, and fabric-draped lampshades it looked more like my uncle’s basement bar than a Miami Beach nightclub.

Caroline was sitting on a single chair just inside the front entrance, her head hanging down and sipping something clear and carbonated through a straw. Beside her stood a large, muscular man in a tight polo shirt. He caught me looking at Caroline as we entered the club.

“Are you Alan?” he asked me.

At the mention of my name Caroline looked up hopefully, and practically sprang out of the chair upon recognizing me.

“Yes,” I said to the man I assumed was the bouncer and extended a hand to Caroline, allowing her to clasp it desperately rather than wrap me up in some kind of bear hug.

The bouncer turned politely to Caroline. “Is everything all right now, miss?”

Caroline nodded, turning her body in towards mine. “Yes,” she said quietly, too quietly, I thought, for the bouncer to hear her. “Yes, thank you.”

Bethany came up and stood on the other side of Caroline, placing a caring hand on her shoulder. Bethany was not much younger than me, and Caroline not much younger than that, but still, standing there, I couldn’t help feeling like we were her parents, coming to rescue her from a car date gone horribly wrong.

“All right,” the bouncer said. “You all take care then.”

“What happened?” I asked him as he turned to go.

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “I don’t know. She never told me.”

“Let’s go,” Caroline said quietly, leaning in close, practically whispering in my ear.

The bouncer returned to his regular duties and we stepped out into the warm night air. Just being outside seemed to revive Caroline a little, her voice sounding less trembly and meek.

“Thank you, guys, so much for coming to get me. No one else wanted to leave and I just had to get out of there. I just had to.”

“What was so awful?” I asked, my eyes already scanning up and down the street for an available cab.

“It was Wes.”

It was like a knife in the back, a sucker punch to the midsection, and the rug being pulled out from under me at the same time. My vision blackened and I teetered momentarily on the edge of the curb. In the blackness that surrounded me it felt like I was back in Don’s office, and all I could see were the tears streaming down Caroline’s face and the calculating stare in Amy’s eyes as they fired her.

“Wes Howard?” Bethany questioned, echoing the dark thought forming in my own brain.

“Yes,” Caroline said.

Bethany and I exchanged a pair of uneasy glances. I thought I knew the limit of what he was capable of, but when I looked into her eyes I couldn’t help but wonder if she knew of something even deeper.

“What did he do?” I asked, turning to look at Caroline.

She didn’t answer me.

“Caroline,” I said severely, forgetting all about the cabs whizzing by. “What did he do? Did he... Did he touch you?”

She looked down at her shoes.

“Caroline, honey,” Bethany said soothingly. “You can tell us. We can do something about it. Did Wes do something inappropriate?”

Caroline started shaking her head. “It’s my fault, really. I didn’t want to come out tonight, but they insisted. They insisted.”

“Don’t do that,” Bethany said angrily, giving Caroline a shake. “Whatever he did, it is not your fault, Caroline. What did he do? Did he touch you?”

Caroline nodded, embarrassed. “He touched us all.”

Bethany and I exchanged another pair of glances, these even darker than before.

“Who?” Bethany said. “Who else did he touch?”

“All of us,” Caroline said, shrugging her shoulders as if having to explain some natural biologic process everyone should already understand. “He can’t keep his hands to himself.”

“Are they still in there?” Bethany asked.

“Yes. Down in the basement. At the karaoke bar.”

Bethany gave me a horrified look. It was filled with equal parts disgust and demand. Do something, it said, as clearly as if she had spoken the words aloud.

I agreed with her imperative. The universe itself demanded that something be done in this ugly circumstance. But what? I didn’t have any idea. And more importantly, was I the guy to do it?

Acting on instinct, I withdrew my hand from Caroline’s and turned her over to Bethany. “Take her back to the hotel,” I said, my voice sounding more confident than I felt. “Get a cab, take her back to her room, and stay there with her until I call you.”

“What are you going to do?”

So she didn’t have any idea either. “I don’t know,” I said, looking back at the door to Club NOW. “Something.”

15

Going back inside Club NOW was like entering another world. Outside it was clear and fresh, the night shining bright with excitement, the hopeful sea air mixing seamlessly with the best expectations of the city. Inside it was dark and stale, the sense if not the sight of grime coating everything, hard people and soft furnishings alike.

I steeled myself and tried to enter this world with a clear sense of purpose -- but I still didn’t know what I was facing or what I would be called on to do. Were there people to save? A dragon to slay? And what weapons did I have at my command? My wits? My fists? As my overactive mind sorted through the variety of possible scenarios I saw myself beating up on Wes, slamming my fist into his face and breaking his jaw, and kicking him in the back as he lay curled up on the floor, and I couldn’t decide if that was ridiculous or inevitable.

One of the bartenders caught my eye. Like the bouncer he was heavily muscled and wore a tight polo shirt. He looked at me with an inquisitive glance, his eyebrow lifting with three shaven stripes along its length, signaling that he was ready to answer a question or take a drink order, whichever I preferred.

“Where’s the karaoke bar?” I asked, loud enough to be heard over the dance music, and feeling like a gunslinger in one of those spaghetti westerns.

“Downstairs,” he said, his words coming to me more through the movement of his lips and the tilt of his head, the pulsating music drowning out his actual vocalizations. It added to the surrealism, like maybe Sergio Leone had hired an Italian extra to play the Cuban bartender in this scene. I turned in the direction he indicated, and I saw a wide flight of stairs heading down. It was flanked by two pillared banisters, each topped with a carved eagle, their hooked talons gripping the heavy oak, their wings extending wide, and their beaks and grim stares greeting anyone foolish enough to rise up out of the depths. A wooden sign, faded and in need of repainting, was hung crookedly on the lip of the upper floor directly over the stairs. It read, “Karaoke - 8 PM to close daily.”

About halfway down the stairs the bellowing karaoke music from below met the pulsating dance music from above and again I felt suspended as if between two worlds. There was a landing up ahead, and a sharp turn to the left, and after that God only knew. The voices I heard were almost entirely female, and their raucousness conjured up in the mind a prurient image -- a chorus line of deeply intoxicated women, arms wrapped around each other in bacchanalian excess, incoherently shouting the words to a pop anthem, and Wes Howard in the center of them all, prancing with them like a satyr, squeezing their flesh and rubbing his crotch against them whenever the opportunity presented itself.

I steeled myself against the distasteful possibility, looking as forward to confronting Wes and his coven as I did to removing dead mice from the traps I put out in the garage. As my foot touched the landing, however, I stopped -- frozen in place by the braying and unmistakable laugh of Amy Crawford, howling out over the din like the shriek of a banshee. 

Amy Crawford. My mind raced to keep up with the beating of my heart. Amy Crawford? Didn’t Don fire her? What the hell is she doing here in Miami Beach?

It didn’t take long for me to realize the answer to my own question. Just one heart-stopping plunge into a pit of understanding too deep ever to think of climbing out of again.

Jesus … fucking … Christ. She actually is sleeping with Wes Howard.

 

I felt a slap on my shoulder and someone hustled past me on the stairs. “Hey, Alan,” a man’s voice said from somewhere outside my consciousness. “You coming down to join us? The ladies are really getting wild tonight.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He was around the corner and down into the karaoke den before I even knew who he was, and it wouldn’t be until much later that I would connect enough dots to realize it was Jeff Hatchler, treating me like the fraternity brother all men in that situation were, regardless of their position above or below you.

But I didn’t move for many more seconds, dots of far greater import connecting themselves in my head like a computer virus running amok in my synapses. She’s sleeping with Wes Howard. That’s why she’s here in Miami Beach. She’s probably staying with him at his hotel, going out drinking and getting it on every night. He’s middle aged, rich, and married, but his wife’s not here, and she’s single, aggressive, and hot as hell. What’s to stop them?

Certainly not me. It was less like I decided that and more like it had been decided for me. This was out of my league. I was a supervisor -- with Susan and Michael gone, supervisor to probably half the women down there -- but the worst I’d ever dealt with was people not showing up on time and taking things that didn’t belong to them from the office refrigerator. This was something entirely different. This was automatic termination. This was illegal. This was downright dangerous.

Not thinking that I would come to regret it, and not realizing just how scared I was, I turned around, hopped up the steps two at a time, and got my ass out of there.

+ + +

“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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