Dragons - Part VI

1

There was a staff meeting scheduled for early the next morning. Staff meetings had been planned for five-thirty every morning during the Annual Conference. It had been Mary’s idea.

“It’s an opportunity, Alan,” she had said to me, standing behind her gargantuan desk deep within her office, just hours before she was leaving for the airport and her flight to Miami. “Don’t pass it up.”

“An opportunity?” I said, suspicious at Mary’s very use of the word. Based on previous experience, it had the portends of ulterior motives. “An opportunity for what?”

“An opportunity to bring people together,” she said, exactly as if she thought such a thing was a good idea. “To help communicate instructions and information, and to remind everyone they’re all on the same team and need to support each other.”

Now I knew she was up to something. “Mary,” I said evenly. “You’ve been to the Annual Conference before. You know it pulls everybody in a thousand different directions. Exactly when are you supposed to bring everyone together?”

Mary was rummaging through her handbag, a sleek, aerodynamic beast that doubled as her briefcase. “First thing in the morning,” she said cavalierly, as if it didn't matter to her in the least, obviously more occupied with the items going in and coming out of her bag. Slinging it over her shoulder she looked me dead in the eye and said with all seriousness, “Start the day out right.”

Indeed. Needless to say, I was not surprised when Mary failed to show up for any of these daily meetings. Staff morale and team building was my responsibility, after all, communicated throughout the company not so much by Mary’s words but by her actions -- like not showing up for staff meetings. Such trifles were beneath her; her valuable time much better spent on important things like molly-coddling Board members and their voracious egos. But although she exempted herself from these functions, dreadful consequences awaited anyone with equal temerity. It was a nice formula. It pretty much prevented me from ever succeeding.

I tried to keep the staff meeting the morning after Club NOW on as much of an even keel as possible. It was five-thirty in the morning and everyone staggered in as if in a fog, reflexively shielding their eyes from the harsh artificial sun of the fluorescent lights, and immediately grabbing a danish from the small continental breakfast or pouring themselves a cup of coffee from the ten-gallon thermos provided by the hotel catering department. As I waited for everyone to caffeine up my thoughts were helplessly occupied by the cruel mathematics of the situation. Two dozen danish at thirty-two dollars a dozen and ten gallons of coffee at seventy-five dollars a gallon. All of it with eight percent tax and delivered with a twenty-three percent service charge.

I kept it brief. There were about twenty of us, standing in a rough circle in the tiny, out-of-the-way meeting room we used as a staff office. I thanked them. I reminded them of the twenty-five breakfast sessions that would be starting in an hour, the big plenary session that would happen after that, and then the grand opening of the exhibit hall. I asked for and received updates from the people running the registration desk and overseeing our interactions with our exhibit decorator and AV provider. I thanked them again. And I told them to stay in contact over the walkie-talkies we had rented, to call for help when they needed it, and to respond when others called for help. Then I clapped my hands, and they broke away like a losing football team leaving the huddle. They left behind their empty coffee cups and plates of half-eaten pastries, piling them up on a banquet tray as they filed out the door. It was over. In ten seconds there was no one left but Bethany and Gerald and Angie and me.

“What was that all about?” Gerald asked.

“What?” I said, not understanding his meaning.

“That,” Gerald said with emphasis. “That little pep talk you just gave at the end. Is that supposed to make people forget about what happened last night?”

I traded a glance with Bethany, and her eyes looked worried, like Gerald was likely to reveal some deep family secret. I looked at Angie and met her bullet stare with as much feigned ignorance as I could.

I decided not to deny that anything had happened. “How do you know about what happened last night?”

“Everyone knows about it,” Gerald said testily. “My god, Alan. Caroline’s not here this morning. Did you think her absence would go unnoticed? The rumor mill is in full force.”

“And what is it saying?”

“That he raped her.”

It was Angie, her gruff voice slicing through the bluster Gerald had been pumping into the air. Bethany gasped, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, and then an oppressive silence descended, deep enough to hear the conditioned air rolling through the ductwork above the ceiling.

“He didn’t rape her,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster. I knew he hadn’t, but in the face of Angie’s flat declaration, I couldn’t help but doubt even myself. Given who Wes was, and his checkered history with attractive young staff members, it was surprising how believable that rumor seemed.

“Then what did he do?” Gerald said immediately. “The staff has the right to know, especially the young women. He’s obviously done something inappropriate; maybe illegal. What’s being done to protect the others, to prevent him from doing it again?”

Maybe it was the look that came unconsciously to my face, the look that revealed the pale fluttering I suddenly felt in my belly.

“Oh, Alan,” Gerald said with aggrieved disappointment. “You haven’t done anything, have you? What happened? Did you think you could lock Caroline away in her hotel room for the rest of the conference and everything would just be fine?”

I found it really difficult to respond to that accusation. I didn’t want to admit he was right, even though I knew I would be hard pressed to prove anything else had been on my mind. I didn’t have a plan, and hadn’t realized I needed one until Gerald started pressing me to produce one.

“I’ve got a meeting to run here, Gerald.”

I thought I was being strong, but if I’d had some time to think about it, there probably wasn’t anything I could have said that would have been worse than that.

“Oh, Jesus, Alan. Fuck the goddamn meeting. Did anyone check on Caroline this morning? Are you sure she’s even still in that hotel room? Or that she isn’t lying in the bathtub with her wrists slit?”

“I did,” Bethany said quickly, rushing more to her own defense than to mine. “I stopped by before the staff meeting. I heard some water running so I called her on her cell phone. She said she was fine, but wasn’t up to facing people today.”

“Did you expect her to?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Bethany said. “Maybe.”

“Do you know what he did to her?”

“He didn’t rape her. To hear Caroline tell it, he just got a little fresh.”

Fresh. Another June Cleaver word. I smiled in spite of the circumstances.

“Do you think this is funny, Alan?”

“No, Gerald,” I said, turning overly serious. “I don’t think this is funny at all.”

“Does Mary know about this?”

Again, it was Angie, stabbing her words into the air like an assassin. If her use of the word ‘rape’ had charged the situation, her reference to ‘Mary’ had set it on fire.

I blanched. There was no other word for it.

“Oh, dear god, Alan. She doesn’t know? You didn’t think to tell her? She owns the fucking company -- don’t you think she’d like a heads-up when one of her people is sexually harrassed?”

To be honest, it had never occurred to me, but I couldn’t very well admit that now. Hearing the shock and anger in Gerald’s voice, it was obvious that such a thing should have occurred to me, that as the most senior representative of the company present, such a thing should have been second nature to me, should have been as obvious as the need to get Caroline out of there.

“It was late,” I said lamely. “Too late to call her. I was planning to brief her this morning, as soon as I saw her.” And then, thinking I was clever, attempting to head the next question off at the pass, “This isn’t the kind of thing one wants to leave on someone’s voicemail.”

“Call her, Alan.” Gerald’s voice was stern; frustrated, I sensed, at having to school a supervisor less experienced than he. “She’s going to want to hear about this as soon as possible.”

“She’s at that VIP breakfast this morning,” I said, my tone unconsciously communicating that I knew she ordinarily wouldn’t want to be disturbed at such a function.

“Then go see her. And, whatever you do, don’t just bring her the problem. Bring her the solution.”

“What?”

“Oh, Christ, Alan, how old are you? A problem like this? If you bring it to her without a solution, she’s just going to blame you for it. Don’t you even know that? You have to come up with the solution. You have to tell her how you’re going to fix it before you even tell her what’s wrong. How’d you get as far as you have if you don’t even know that?”

I didn’t like his demeaning tone, even less so with Bethany and Angie standing there as silent witnesses, but he was right. If he hadn’t been so right I probably wouldn’t have allowed him to speak to me that way. But what he said was obviously right, so right that I couldn’t legitimately call him out for simply calling my attention to it. I’d look an even bigger fool than I already felt.

“You got real responsibilities here, Alan. And you’d better start seeing to them.”

2

I didn’t know what to do after Gerald’s drubbing down. I mean, I knew what to do next -- go find Mary and tell her what happened. That was so obvious that I wasted no time in excusing myself and leaving the three of them behind in the staff office. But in the bigger picture I really didn’t know what to do.

I did know that Gerald shouldn’t have spoken to me the way that he had -- that no one should ever speak to their boss that way, especially in front of other staffers. But everyone was so used to Gerald breaking the rules, and what he had said made so much sense, that I hadn’t the gumption or presence of mind to do anything about it. How could I have legitimately called him out? All he did, in his own colorful way, was remind me of my responsibilities -- of the things I should have taken care of without being told. If I had tried to reprimand him, to slap him down for speaking out of turn, I’d have looked like an even bigger fool than I already felt. Especially, I knew, in Bethany and Angie’s eyes.

The plain and simple fact was that I was in over my head. As I rode up the elevator to Eleanor’s suite, after running like a scared fool down the street to her hotel, that reality firmly hit home for the first time. I wasn’t cut out for this. I never asked for any of these supervisory responsibilities. They were simply thrust upon me after demonstrating my competence in lower level positions and my willingness to stay with the company. I hadn’t received any training. There was no management school that the company sent promising candidates to. There wasn’t even an orientation session for new supervisors. Just learn by doing, that was more or less the philosophy, and the learning part was optional. Just do. Just perform. Just do what we expect you to do without us ever even telling you what it is.

When the elevator doors opened and I stepped out onto the colorful carpeting of the VIP floor, I still didn’t know what I was going to say. Despite everything I had just experienced, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing or why. Tell Mary what happened. That directive was still imprinted on my brain, but why and what for wasn’t at all clear. As I moved down the hallway, my eyes focused on the space ahead of my shoes, the patterns of color seemed to twist and swirl as I passed by, combining with my early morning fog to make me slightly dizzy. Before I knew it, I was standing in front of Eleanor’s door, room 2600, the Commodore Suite, a ridiculous name, perhaps, for a woman more interested in fresh flowers than the nautical theme that dominated the decor, but apropos of Eleanor’s unrelenting style of command and control.

I raised my hand to knock, but then remembered the glowing button that served as a doorbell -- a doorbell, yes, the suite was so large it needed a doorbell. No guarantee that someone standing in the waterfall shower in the marble-tiled third bathroom would even hear my meek little tap-tap-tapping on the door. I raised a finger but stopped, catching movement out of the corner of my eye. The suite’s service door was open -- not fully, just barely ajar because someone had turned the metal bar that served as a chain lock outward, preventing the door from closing completely. Through the crack I could see someone moving, most likely, based on the clothes, a hotel employee.

Deciding slipping in the service entrance made more sense for the task I had come to perform, I did exactly that, finding myself in a small kitchen area, surrounded by granite countertops and trading dance steps in the small space with a hostess from the banquets department, someone I had briefly met at the Board’s reception the night before, a woman named Matilda who was in charge of all services in Eleanor’s suite.

“Good morning, sir,” she said. “Can I help you with something?”

“No,” I said, looking past her and knowing she was too polite to tell me I had come in the wrong door. “I’m not here for the breakfast. I just need to tell Mary something.”

“Mary?” Matilda said.

Also in the kitchen space stood a chef in a white outfit and a tall hat making crepes to order on a small portable grill. On the opposite side of the serving counter a VIP I didn’t recognize stood, plate in hand, and beyond him, out of the suite’s main parlor about thirty other people stood -- most of our Board members and a dozen or so of our organization’s major sponsors -- gathered in small groups of three or five, champagne mimosas in most hands.

“Sorry,” I said. “Mrs. Walton,” knowing that was how Matilda had most likely been trained to think of her. “Is she here?”

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Walton was the first guest to arrive.”

I’m sure she was. I spotted her across the room, deep in discussion with Eleanor and Gino Del Monaco, our primary contact with our foremost sponsor. That’s what this VIP breakfast was all about -- part thank you for the support offered by our sponsors throughout the year, part venue for negotiating deals for next year.

Matilda handed me an unasked-for mimosa, its bubbly orange color glowing in a gold-rimmed champagne glass. I took it without thinking and stepped out into the suite. The VIP waiting for his crepe gave me a passing glance, but I blew right by him, leaving the smells of fresh ingredients and propane gas behind. Part of me wanted to charge right up to Mary and get it over with, but I knew that wouldn’t fly. Gerald might have convinced me I had to tell Mary what had happened, but no one could convince me it would be wise to tell anyone else at this breakfast reception. I had to first catch Mary’s attention and then get her alone for a few minutes.

I positioned myself in a place I thought Mary could not miss seeing me and then waited for her head to turn the right way. When it did her eyes passed over me with clinical detachment, observing more than seeing, recognizing my presence and, rather than showing surprise, expertly calculating what my uninvited appearance portended and assigning me a prioritized position in the hierarchy of tasks she needed to accomplish at this function. Appropriately categorized, she turned away from me and back towards Gino.

“Good morning.”

It was Paul Webster, the vice chair of the Board and the one who had questioned me at the Board meeting yesterday. He had appeared unexpectedly at my elbow and nearly startled me out of my skin. He was wearing the same blue suit he had on the day before, but now with a bright red tie.

“Hello,” I said to him, keeping my eye on Mary.

“I didn’t think you were invited to this thing.”

Now I turned more fully towards him. His tone had been playful, and his face equally so. He wasn’t so much the enforcer but a co-conspirator. At least he was trying to be.

“I wasn’t,” I said, trying to keep my voice as neutral as possible, and taking my first sip of my mimosa. “I’m just here to tell Mary something.”

“Everything all right?”

My heart skipped a beat, the champagne bubbles seeming to expand painfully in my chest. The last thing I wanted was to tell Paul what was going on. Cursing myself for not being better at small talk, I did everything I could to turn on the charm.

“It’s nothing,” I said casually. “Just a report from our morning staff meeting. How are things here?”

“Scripted,” Paul said bluntly. “Same as they always are.”

“Is that bad?” I asked, knowing that’s just how Mary liked things.

Paul seemed to think about it for a moment or two, slurping an ice cube from his mimosa and rolling it around on his tongue. “No, I guess not,” he said, crunching his molars down on the cube. “Not if we expect to raise the money we need for next year’s programs.”

I largely agreed with him. Getting the corporations who supported our organization to part with their money was one of Mary’s prime functions -- and she set-up functions like this at the Annual Conference to best accomplish it. A whole series of seemingly casual but carefully planned interactions would take place at breakfast this morning, and the balance of the day would be taken up with closed door meetings with Mary, Eleanor, and people like Gino. One by one they would meet and determine how much would be offered in the year ahead -- how much, what for, and in return for which favors and what recognition. It was all a kind of game, but one with serious consequences. One less commitment, one reduction in the level of support could mean the abandonment of programs and the layoff of the staff that organized them.

“And it looks like Mary is reeling some in right now.”

I smiled politely, desperately wanting to get out of the conversation but unable to come up with a graceful way of doing it. Luckily, I thought, Mary would come to my rescue. In just a few short seconds, her discussion with Gino appeared to come to a cheerful end, she directed Eleanor towards another potential donor, and she made her way across the shag carpet to where Paul and I were standing.

“Good morning,” she said upon arrival, nodding to Paul, but zeroing in on me. “Alan, is something up?”

“Just my morning report,” I said, trying not to be too obvious about cocking my head in Paul’s direction.

“Yes?” she said, trying to play along but clearly not understanding the game.

I looked at Paul.

He got it. “Hey,” he said suddenly. “I think one of our sponsors left a big pile of money under the piano in the other room. Why don’t I go pick it up while the two of you talk business?”

Mary gave him a smile that expressed neither warmth nor humor, and we both watched him go.

“What are you doing here?” Mary asked in a terse whisper as soon as Paul was out of earshot.

I placed my mostly full mimosa on the tray of a passing hostess. “There was another incident with Wes Howard last night.”

I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I hadn’t even thought about how to begin. The words just came out of my mouth.

“What? Where?”

“At some karaoke bar. He was there with a whole bunch of our staff. And…”

My hesitation must have made Mary look suspiciously around the room. My eyes followed hers. No one seemed to be paying any attention to us. 

“And?” she said, stepping even closer to me.

“And, Amy Crawford was with him.”

The look that passed over Mary’s face told me that even she had not foreseen such a circumstance. “What is she doing here?”

She. Bitterness towards a vanquished foe, returned unexpectedly to battle.

I told her I didn’t know, that I hadn’t even seen her, that I had recognized her from the maniacal cackle that had risen up from the bowels of the karaoke subbasement.

“What were you doing there?”

It was only then that I told her about the phone call from Caroline, the way Bethany and I had picked her up from the bar, and the things she had and hadn’t said about Wes Howard.

Mary took the information in silence, her head nodding as her calculating accountant’s brain worked on processing it all.

“So,” she said eventually. “Neither you nor Bethany witnessed any of this alleged behavior.”

“Well, no,” I felt forced to confess, “but there must have been a dozen or more other witnesses. Caroline said that most of the junior staff was down there with them.”

“Have you spoken to any of them?”

It was expressed like an accusation. I could practically feel her rhetorical finger poking me in the chest.

“No,” I said meekly. “I thought I should talk to you first.”

Mary nodded, her eyes starting to scan the room again. “Okay,” she said, her attention still out there among the VIPs. “I need to finish a few conversations up here. But we need to talk.” She brought up a wrist and glanced at her Cartier watch. “Where can I meet you at … oh, at nine-thirty?”

I looked at my own Timex. It was six minutes after seven.

“Ummm,” I said, trying to recall the details of the hectic schedule I had on this, the opening day of our Annual Conference. “The staff office?”

“Where is that again?”

I gave her the room location and she nodded. “Okay. We’ll talk then.”

And then she slipped away, her eyes having never fully reconnected with mine. I watched her move purposefully towards a small circle of other people, interject herself into their conversation, and receive a warm welcome and a round of happy handshakes.

3

I got out of there as quickly and as discreetly as I could. I wanted to avoid any possibly incriminating conversations with the other board members, but found that, on the walk back to the convention hotel, I couldn’t avoid such a conversation with myself.

What the hell had I just done? I had told Mary what had happened, but what else? Anything? Was I any closer to dealing with the issue that Wes Howard and Amy Crawford had created for us? No, I wasn’t. In fact, it felt like I was farther away than I had been before. Previously, I hadn’t known what I was supposed to do, but was free to act in any manner that I saw fit. Now I had passed the buck to Mary, and would have to wait until at least nine-thirty before I could take any action, and then it would have to be whatever Mary determined for me. Was that what I was looking for when I marched myself over to Eleanor’s hotel? To remove any responsibility that I might have for solving the problem?

That thought stopped me dead in my tracks, Gerald’s condescending voice ringing in the ears of my recently remembered past.

Oh, Christ, Alan, how old are you? A problem like this? If you bring it to her without a solution, she’s just going to blame you for it. Don’t you even know that? 

No, Gerald. I guess I don’t. Up there in the heights of Eleanor’s seventy-five dollar breakfast and seventy-five hundred dollar view, the idea that this was my problem to solve had completely slipped my mind.

4

By the time I got back to the convention hotel, the registration desk we had set-up in the foyer of their biggest ballroom was open for business and lines of early-morning conference-goers were already queued up under the signs reflecting the starting initials of their last names. A dozen or more redcoats were expertly rifling through the line of battered boxes that contained their registration packets, handing the right one over to each visitor with a smile and sometimes a friendly pat on the hand. We called them redcoats because of the polyester blazers they all wore, undoubtedly issued to them by the local Convention & Visitors Bureau who provided them to traveling conventions like ours for something between the minimum wage and the union contracted labor wages of the teamsters, electricians, and riggers who set up our exhibit hall and hoisted our lighting trusses into the air. The redcoats were invariably retirees, mostly blue-haired ladies, who liked both the people contact and the supplemental income the task provided. Working amongst them were three of our own staff members -- Jeff Hatchler, Jurgis Pavlov, and Bethany Bishop.

I went behind the registration tables like I belonged there and made my way over to Bethany. “How are things here?” I asked her.

“No,” she was saying to one of the redcoats, atypically a man, with the word STANLEY punched onto the little plastic nametag pinned to the lapel of his red blazer. “Only the people with the red stars on their envelopes get the red tickets. They’ll need them to claim one of the box lunches on Monday.”

STANLEY nodded and returned to his station under the letters E-H.

Bethany turned towards me, obviously expecting another redcoat with another question.

“How are things here?” I asked again.

She nodded several times, placing her hands on her hips on surveying the mostly organized chaos around her. “Good,” she said with some satisfaction. “Couple of hiccups getting started, but things are working now.”

“Hiccups?”

She hooked a thumb towards Jurgis, hunched over with his tie hanging in the guts of one of the laser printers.

“None of the printers would take our badge stock, but Jurgis is getting them to respond.”

I looked toward Jurgis. “Good,” I said.

“What happened with Mary?”

It was barely a whisper, shushing out of Bethany’s lips as if it was afraid to be seen in the light.

“What?” I asked, turning back toward her.

“Mary,” she whispered again. “Didn’t you talk to her? About Caroline?”

“No,” I said easily, unthinkingly, more out of a desire to shut down the conversation than to lie. “She was too busy with the VIP breakfast to get into it with me.”

I stopped. STANLEY was back at Bethany’s elbow.

“Excuse me,” he said boldly, holding up a roll of blue tickets. “Is everyone supposed to get one of these?”

“What?” Bethany said, torn between what more I might say and the demands of the busy registration desk.

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “Mary and I are meeting at nine-thirty to discuss the situation. You go help Stanley. I’ve got an exhibit hall to open before then.”

“What?” Bethany said again. “Oh, okay.”

And with that I left her there, moving out from behind the registration desk and into the open foyer of the ballroom. As I passed through to the escalator that would take me to the lower level exhibit hall, I accidently caught Jeff Hatchler’s eye at the other end of the desk. Like Bethany, he was there to guide the redcoats and pitch in when necessary, but he seemed to have found a brief lull in the blizzard. With some heavy flurries continuing to fall all around him, he was just standing there with his arms crossed on his chest, a sea captain smugly satisfied with the exertions of his sailors.

Seeing me, he nodded and winked.

I kept moving.

5

The exhibit hall opened without a hitch, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Angie Ferguson. When I found her, thirty minutes before show opening, standing astride the main aisle with a walkie-talkie in each hand, periodically barking orders into one or the other, her blocky frame surrounded by a swirl of electricians, independent construction contractors, and booth personnel, I have to admit I had my doubts. There were still crates to be removed from the floor, aisle carpet to be put down, and trash to be picked up. I didn’t see how it could all get done in thirty minutes, and waited impatiently for Angie to complete one of her seemingly continuous radio dialogues to express that very concern.

Angie could tell I was anxious and held up one of her fingers in the hand that was holding the walkie she wasn’t currently talking into.

“Booth five-zero-zero-one, Earl,” she was saying into the other one. “Right at the front of the hall. They’ve been waiting for internet access since six last night. Get someone over there and get it taken care of.”

I tried to say something, but Angie wagged her silencing finger at me.

The walkie-talkie next to her face crackled, and then Earl’s voice came back. “Okay. Booth five-zero-zero-one.”

“And then get a scissor lift over to booth seven-five-one-five. The sign your guys hung above their booth is crooked and they want it fixed.”

Crackle. “Seven-five-one-five. Got it.”

“And then get all the empty crates off the show floor. There’s a whole pile of them back by the south restrooms. We can’t start dropping aisle carpet until all the forklifts are off the floor.”

This time the crackle was slower in coming, but I knew better than to interrupt. Angie and I stood looking at each other, waiting for Earl to acknowledge.

Crackle. “Copy that.”

“What is it?” Angie asked me suddenly. 

“Are we going to be ready?” I asked, popping my arm out to look at my wristwatch. “We’re supposed to open the hall in twenty-six minutes.

“Yes, no problem,” Angie replied matter-of-factly, handing me one of the walkie-talkies she was holding. “Go man the front entrance. Keep the ropes up until I signal you.”

I took the black Motorola from her, looking it over and trying to remember the insufficient orientation I had received in its use.

I had no time to ask. Before I could say another word, an exhibitor inserted herself between me and Angie and started complaining loudly about malfunctioning lights in her booth.

“Earl,” Angie said into her remaining radio, as she began moving purposefully in the direction of the frustrated exhibitor’s booth. “Have an electrician meet me in booth two-six-eight-two ASAP. Those lights are blinking out again.”

If Earl acknowledged that last command, I never knew, since Angie had already moved out of my earshot. Earl, I knew, was our service representative at the company we had hired to set-up, coordinate, and tear down our exhibit hall. He was a hard-working man, someone with a thick Chicago accent, who frequently took his clients out for drinks and who always looked like he had slept in his clothes. Where he was, and how he was coordinating all the things Angie demanded of him over her walkie-talkies; I didn’t have any idea.

At the front entrance of the exhibit hall, a thin rope line had been set up, something to keep the gathering masses at bay while the sense-overwhelming experience of our exhibit hall was prepared for them. And the masses were starting to gather, at least a hundred milling about when I arrived at T minus eighteen minutes. A line of three hired security guards stood equally spaced immediately behind the rope line, guards who had let me pass minutes before on the evidence of my staff badge, but who didn’t know me from Adam. I waved my newly-acquired walkie-talkie at one of them as a symbol of my authority.

“Angie’s going to call me when it’s okay to open the hall,” I said.

The person I was speaking to simply nodded, his droopy eyes giving the appearance that he hadn’t slept in days. His uniform pants were too long for his legs and his coat was too big in the shoulders.

I looked at the other two in turn, repeating myself, waiting for someone to show a glimmer of recognition. I was not so rewarded, so I simply took my place among them. When they all silently adjusted their positions so that the four of us were equally spaced across the rope line, however, I couldn’t help but feel like I had been accepted, a little like an extra outfielder in the peewee leagues.

When they started rolling out the bright red aisle carpet, we had no more than five minutes to spare, and the crowd on the other side of the rope line had grown at least five fold. They were all pressed tightly against each other, forming a concentrated mass of humanity. Tall and short, fat and thin; they were there in strength. But they were, I realized, almost entirely old, or at least older than me, and all dressed in the same business attire one would wear to an interview. The men among them all looked like Paul Webster and the women all looked like Eleanor Rumford, certainly not in their skin colors and hairdos, but most certainly in their age, attire, and bodily presence. They were professionals, well established in their careers, and yet here they stood, willingly packed together like teenagers trying to get into a rock concert.

One of them met my eyes. It was a woman, the lanyard of her name badge hanging crookedly across her breasts, and three bags -- a purse, a briefcase, and one of the throwaway convention bags we gave to each attendee -- hanging awkwardly from straps on her shoulders. She was pressed between two men, neither of them seemingly aware of her presence. For a moment a look of discomfort passed over her face, and then her eyes seemed to drift back into a kind of willing and learned obedience, like a beast of burden waiting for its turn at the feeding trough.

My walkie-talkie crackled. “This is Angie calling Alan.”

I looked at my watch. It was one minute before nine o’clock. I pushed one of the buttons on the walkie-talkie and waited for it to beep. 

“Go ahead, Angie.”

Crackle. “You can open the hall now.”

“Ten-four,” I said, and without having to tell them the three security guards moved forward to unhook and remove the restraining rope. In an instant the crowd began flowing into the exhibit hall, exactly, I thought, like Christmas shoppers on the day after Thanksgiving, anxious to get their hands and their credit cards on the shiny baubles that the witch doctors in a hundred different marketing departments had been working all year to convince them they could not live without. I stood like an unyielding boulder in a stream, the people flowing all around me. At one point I even closed my eyes, and focused solely on the breezy sensation of their passing.

6

At nine-thirty I went down to the staff office to meet with Mary. She wasn’t there. At that moment, no one was there, everyone else evidently out running some aspect of the conference itself. Behind them they had left scattered banquet chairs, piles of torn cardboard boxes, and paper plates smeared with the remains of breakfast danishes. I sat down on one of the chairs and tried to gather my thoughts.

Fuck, I was tired. That was the first and overwhelming thought I remember pouring through my brain. It was only the first day of the conference and I already felt exhausted. I put my face in my hands and tried to rub the fatigue out of my eyes.

I wondered what was going to happen. The situation with Caroline, with Amy and Wes Howard; I knew it was a major problem, but at that time I didn’t have any idea what could possibly be done about it. And then, unexpectedly, almost as if I was channeling her, I felt a sudden onrush of Susan Sanford’s fury coursing through my veins. It was the fury she had shown on her return from the education conference, where the problem that was Amy and Wes Howard had first revealed itself. For an instant I was as angry as she had been, my vision clouded by her desperate and wailing cry for justice. But just as quickly as Susan’s fury came it passed, and swelling up in its place was my own all-enveloping sense of foreboding fear. Fear that something awful was bound to happen, and that no one, least of all me, could do anything to stop it.

I looked at my watch. It was nine-thirty-six. 

What quelled Susan’s fury and fed my own fear, I knew, was the memory of how Mary had reacted to Susan’s outrage. Where I could feel Susan’s anger, now as I did then, creeping in under my skin, raising the hair on the back of my neck, and compelling me towards some instinctive action, Mary, as she always seemed capable of being, had been simply cold, calm, and methodical. Despite Susan’s posture, a blustering dervish storming into her office, Mary, I remembered, had simply received the base information, pushed back on the accusations to test and understand them, and then decided on a direct course of action.

And what a decision it was. Susan had brought a problem named Wes Howard, but Mary had quickly and expertly turned it into a pair of problems named Amy Crawford and Caroline Abernathy. They were the ones who had acted inappropriately -- disrespecting their supervisor and embarrassing the company in front of the clients it served. Susan, Mary had claimed, had no evidence of Wes’s misconduct, and therefore the smartest and safest thing to do was to discipline the employees who had been involved. Minutes later, a pair of meetings took place, Mary leaning heavily on Don Bascom to fire Amy and chew out Caroline.

I looked at my watch again. It was nine-thirty-eight.

I stood up. I was sweating. Wondering why it was so hot in the windowless room we had chosen as our staff office, I started pacing back and forth across the garish carpeting.

I saw the obvious parallel between that situation and the situation we were facing now. The scene was the same, only this time around, I realized with heart-skipping certainty, I had cast myself in the role of Susan Sanford. This time, it was me, not Susan, that had brought Mary the problem of Wes Howard and Amy Crawford. Did I really think Mary was going to do anything different this time? Why would she? The last time Wes caused trouble Mary pinned it on the involved staff. She would undoubtedly do so again. In fact, she may even have gone out of her way to show me that was how she operated. What other reason was there for including me in both Amy’s termination and Caroline’s reprimand? I had no role to play in either meeting. Was that Mary’s attempt at a teachable moment? Was she coaching me? Showing me the way? Here, Alan. This is how we deal with problems around here. I felt my stomach drop to the floor as I realized that this might possibly be true.

At nine-forty-five I took out my cell phone and tried calling Mary. I listened to it ring four times and then her voicemail greeting kicked in. I hung up and tried redialing. This time it rang twice before the automated message picked up.

“Hello, this is Mary Walton. I can’t take your call right now, so please leave a message after the beep. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

I hung up again. Where was she? Now she was almost twenty minutes late, and I had to be somewhere else at ten o’clock. If she didn’t come soon, I would miss her, and then who knows when we would have another opportunity to connect.

I stopped myself short. The fear I had just been feeling helped put another idea in my head. Maybe it would be better if Mary and I did miss each other. Mary had already proven that she was not interested in solving the actual problem of Wes Howard, focusing instead on whatever was needed in order to preserve the relationship with the client. She was willing to sacrifice the careers or well being of her staff people for that objective.

Was I? A flurry of questions went racing through my mind. Weren’t there some circumstances where a client’s behavior was so egregious, so illegal, so wrong, that the right decision was to sever that relationship and protect the young and underpaid professionals who had been victimized? Was this one of those cases? And if so, did I have the wherewithal to do something about it?

Then I thought suddenly about the values project that Mary had put me in charge of, the draft statements still living unrealized on a forlorn document on my laptop. They had not yet been presented to our staff as official, Mary wanting everyone to get successfully through this conference before doing so. But I had long since committed them to memory. I was proud of them, or at least proud of the process we had used to create them. But now, some of those simple sentence fragments seemed to mock me.

Shows initiative.

Anticipates challenges. 

Creatively applies resources to solve problems.

These were among the things we agreed were necessary for success in our environment, attributes it would be necessary for our staff to demonstrate. And they weren’t handed down from above, dictates from the mysterious figure in the corner office. They were developed by the very people who would need to embrace them in order to make them real. They were words on a piece of paper, of course they were, but they were also something more. Mary could pick and choose which ones she liked and which ones she didn’t, but they, in whatever combination she was comfortable with, were something larger than even her. They had a power, latent now, but there, and present, ready to be tapped when we needed them.

And now I realized with embarrassment that I had failed to live up to them. With regard to the problem that was Wes Howard, from the moment Susan had fatalistically brought it to my attention, I had done exactly the opposite of what our draft values required of me. What had I done instead? I punted. I had simply deferred the necessary decisions to Mary Walton.

I looked at my watch again. It was nine-fifty-five, and I was still all alone in our forgotten staff office.

To hell with it, and to hell with Mary Walton. I had to get myself to my ten o’clock appointment, and after that, I was determined to start taking matters into my own hands.

7

On the way out of the staff office, I physically bumped into Mary Walton. I was moving so quickly and with so much determination, I nearly knocked her off her designer heels.

“My god, Mary, I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out to catch her before she fell. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Alan,” she said, clutching my arm in an attempt to right herself. “I’m fine.” Her hand brushed coldly over mine as she disengaged. “Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

“I have a ten o’clock meeting with Doctor Lancaster in the speaker ready room,” I said truthfully. I didn’t have to explain to Mary that Dr. Douglas Lancaster was our keynote speaker, a mentor of and personally selected by Eleanor Rumsfeld. “He wants to go over the technical requirements of his presentation.”

Mary looked at her watch, the sparkles of its diamonds flashing me as it came out from under the sleeve of her suit jacket. Although much more expensive than the one I wore, it undoubtedly told her the same thing mine would have. It was nine-fifty-six.

“I thought we had set this as the time to discuss the situation with Amy Crawford.”

I suspected that Mary knew we had said nine-thirty and that she was the one who was twenty-six minutes late, but her tone was challenging, daring me to call her out or contradict her. It felt like she was testing me. In a lot of my interactions with Mary lately, I realized, it felt like she was testing me.

“I thought we said nine-thirty,” I said simply. “Should we reschedule?”

“No,” she said quickly. “This shouldn’t take long.”

“Okay,” I said, and then stood there silently. After finding conviction among my recent introspections, I no longer wanted to have this conversation with Mary. It didn’t look like I was going to be able to avoid it, but I certainly didn’t have to initiate anything.

After a pause, Mary carefully checked our surroundings. “Is there anyone in the staff office?”

“No,” I said.

“Let’s go in there.”

“Okay.”

Standing safely behind the closed door, Mary got right down to business.

“First off, Alan, I want to let you know that you did the right thing bringing this to my attention.”

“I did?”

“Yes, absolutely. Our relationship with Wes Howard is a very important one. Had you decided to confront him last night, there’s no telling what kind of damage you might have done.”

The blank look on my face must have prompted Mary’s next response.

“Inadvertently, of course. I’m not saying you would do anything to intentionally harm the firm, Alan. You’ve always demonstrated good judgment in these matters and last night was no exception.”

Wait. She’s praising me? For doing nothing?

“Mary,” I said, my suspicions suddenly on full alert. “Have you already spoken to Wes?”

“Yes. Just now.”

So that’s why she was late.

“He has assured me that he will not bring Amy to any more of our events.”

It took about five seconds -- five seconds of me staring open mouthed at Mary -- for the full meaning of her words to hit me. When they did, I felt like the earth moved under my feet.

“He’s not going to bring Amy to any more of our events?”

“Yes,” Mary said, her voice already shifting to her this-matter-is-closed tone. “As you witnessed, it’s too disruptive. Amy is a former member of our staff, someone who left under difficult circumstances. Her presence brings the questions surrounding those circumstances back to the surface, and too many of our staff members, as young as they are, can’t be expected to parse them appropriately. It will inevitably cause them to compromise their professionalism, and that harms both the firm and the client that Wes represents.”

Mary stopped herself short. “What?” she asked me. “What are you looking at me like that for? Once I explained it to Wes he knew exactly what I was talking about.”

My mind was racing. Four minutes ago I had been ready to fight my way to the top of the pile, and now I felt like my legs were about to give out underneath me. But some of my piss and vinegar was still swirling around in my gut, and it was telling, daring, demanding that I tell Mary how utterly fucked up she and this whole sorry affair was. Mary, it wanted me to say, the problem isn’t that Wes Howard brought Amy Crawford to our event. The problem is that Wes Howard is a predator, and his prey are all the young women you hire to work long hours for little pay. You’re either oblivious to what is really going on or you are complicit in his crimes. All telling him he can’t bring Amy around is going to do is put other members of your staff in his crosshairs. Why the fuck do you think Caroline was crying and begging me to come get her? Amy Crawford isn’t the one who needs to be banned from our events. Wes Howard is!

“Alan? What is it?”

I realize now that this was one of those rare moments of truth. And to my credit, despite all the wrong turns I would take at so many other crossroads, this time I decided to ever so carefully proceed on the high road.

“Mary, I don’t think just getting Wes to agree to not bring Amy around addresses the real issue.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because, there’s nothing to stop him from…”

“From? From what?”

The words were there, I was just having a hard time saying them.

“There’s nothing to stop him from … from hitting on other members of our staff.”

“Oh, Alan! Don’t start with that, please! We’re talking about grown-ups here.”

“Yes, Mary, we are. And as grown-ups, we shouldn’t be afraid to admit what’s really going on.”

I’ve subsequently had a lot of time to think about those words, those words that came so blithely out of my mouth when I was alone with Mary in our conference staff office. And with the benefit of tremendous hindsight, I see that few words spoken have ever been more both the absolutely right and the absolutely wrong things to say.

Mary visibly paled. “Look Alan,” she said with sudden frailty. “I won’t have you speaking to me like that.”

“Like what?”

“With such disrespect.”

I put up a pair of surrendering hands. “I meant no disrespect, Mary. It’s just that people are talking, and they don’t see this thing the way you do. The problem isn’t Amy Crawford. The problem is Wes Howard.”

“You know, Alan,” Mary said, her voice shifting tone again, regaining most of the self-satisfied dominance she typically displayed. “People are talking about more than just Amy Crawford and Wes Howard. They’re talking about you. You and your inability to lead them effectively.”

It was probably meant to knock me off my feet. But these were the trenches, and despite the legitimate power Mary was able to wield over me, the trenches were where I was used to fighting. 

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” she said icily. “Michael resigned because of you, and now Gerald is asking me to reassign him to another client.”

“He asked you what?” I couldn’t help it. I knew she was only trying to rattle me, but the idea of Gerald talking about me behind my back did exactly that.

“He doesn’t want to work with you anymore. He says you’re a terrible leader.”

I had a few choice words about Gerald, too, but I bit my tongue.

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion, Mary. What’s yours?”

Judging by the expression that passed over her face, I’d have to say I both surprised and impressed her with that one.

“Honestly, Alan, I’m no longer sure.” Now she was a mother, expressing her disappointment with an ill-behaved child. “You’ve shown so much promise in so many areas, but ever since this latest promotion your priorities seem to be off.”

“Off?”

“Yes, off. You don’t seem as dedicated to the client’s success as you used to be. I’ve opened several doors for you, but you’ve been reluctant to step through them.”

“What are you talking about?” I really didn’t have any idea. Her corporate-speak was like a foreign language I had forgotten how to use.

“Even Eleanor has noticed,” Mary continued. “She thinks I’ve promoted you too soon.”

That didn’t answer my question. “Mary,” I said again, doing my best to keep my voice level. “What are you talking about? What doors haven’t I stepped through? I’ve been working my ass off, doubly so since Susan left.”

“You probably shouldn’t bring up Susan with me, Alan,” Mary said, her voice under better control than mine. “She’d still be with us if you would’ve handled that situation better. Both Don and I think you’re the reason she decided to leave, too.”

Now I was starting to feel dizzy. What the fuck are you talking about?

I will probably never know if those last words actually came out of my mouth, or if they only rang out in my enraged mind, because at that very moment the staff office door opened and Angie Ferguson came barrelling into the room, a balanced stack of empty registration boxes in her arms.

“Alan!” she practically shouted. “There you are! Doctor Lancaster is waiting for you in the speaker ready room. Did you forget or something?”

“I didn’t forget!” I snapped back. “I’m having a conversation here.”

The stack of boxes and the way the door opened prevented her from seeing Mary. She turned in place and, in her surprise and movement, tipped the stack of boxes in Mary’s direction, who had to bat them out of the way to keep them from hitting her in the face.

“Oh, god, I’m sorry, Mary. Didn’t see you there.”

“It’s all right,” Mary said in a tone that indicated it was anything but all right.

Angie kept moving into the room, tossing the few boxes that remained in her grasp into a corner of the room, the place we had already designated as the trash zone. “Should I tell him you’ll be late?” she said as she busied herself with retrieving the remaining boxes from around Mary’s feet.

“Mary?” I asked.

“Go,” she said, her attention seemingly more on Angie’s movements than anything that had been said between us. “Don’t keep Doctor Lancaster waiting any longer.”

I stood there for a moment, waiting for Mary to say something else. We’ll talk later. We’re not finished here. I’ll get you, you son of a bitch. Anything that would acknowledge the hostile and unprofessional exchange we had just had, but there was nothing more coming.

“Okay,” I eventually said and left the room.

8

The meeting with Dr. Lancaster was basically uneventful. I had never met him before, and he turned out to be a kind and pleasant old man who was simply distrustful of computers. I was obviously late getting to the speaker ready room, and when I arrived Dr. Lancaster was already deep in dialogue with one of our lead audio-visual techs.

“If you’re more comfortable with thirty-five millimeter slides, Doctor Lancaster, we can certainly accommodate,” the tech was saying. His name was Ray, a good guy, but he had the habitually droopy eyes of a regular weed smoker. 

“You can?” Dr. Lancaster replied, the surprise evident in his voice.

“Sure,” Ray said, looking up at me as I joined their little circle. “I’ve got a few slide projectors on the truck. If Alan here gives the word, I can get one set up in the back of the ballroom and then use the i-mag camera to send your slide image to all the main and delay screens.”

Dr. Lancaster turned my way. “Are you Alan Larson?”

“I am, Doctor Lancaster,” I said, shaking his extended hand. “I’m sorry for being late.”

“No trouble at all. But I hope you can understand what this young man just said.”

I could and I did, and in a few minutes more the plan was approved and understood by all. It was a simple fix, really. Something that only required a little creativity and an AV budget in excess of six figures. My mind, however, was frankly not on Dr. Lancaster and his technology phobia, but on the conversation Mary and I had just had.

I was in trouble. That much was clear. I had challenged her leadership and, at least from Mary’s point of view, disrespected her. I had been with the company long enough to know what eventually happened to people who did that.

After the keynote session began, and Dr. Lancaster was satisfactorily embarked on his 45-minute presentation, I quietly stepped out of the ballroom and called home.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Jenny. It’s me.”

“Alan? Oh my god, what’s wrong?”

“What makes you think something’s wrong?”

“It’s the middle of the day. You never call home from the Annual Conference in the middle of the day.”

“You’re right. Something’s wrong.”

“What is it?”

I told her in as few brushstrokes as possible. Caroline’s desperate call. Amy’s cackling laugh. Gerald’s drubbing down. Mary’s suspicious ignorance. My fateful decision. It took a lot longer than I expected to get it all out. About halfway through I started pacing back and forth across the teal and green carpet in the ballroom foyer, but Jenny remained patiently silent throughout. Only when I was clearly finished did she offer any words of wisdom.

“Alan, honey. You’re fucked.”

I stopped pacing.

“I am, aren’t I?”

“You crossed the dragon. She’s going to roast you alive.”

I was nodding my head. “And not quickly. She’s going to make my life miserable.”

There was a strange silence on the phone. For a moment I thought the call had been dropped.

“Jenny?”

“I’m here, Alan.”

“What are we going to do?”

This time there was no hesitation. 

“We’re going to get you that new job. Have you had a chance to call Quest Partners yet?”

“No,” I said, starting to pace again. “Maybe you should call for me.”

“I can’t do that, Alan. They want to talk to you.”

“I’m juggling a lot of balls here, Jenny. Can you at least find out if they want me to fly to Boston, or if they are going to send someone to interview me.”

“They want you to fly to Boston. They even said they would pay for the ticket.”

“They did?”

“Yes, I told you that last night.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. I could tell you weren’t listening to me.”

I stopped. Now it was my turn to nurture a strange silence. Jenny often accused me of not listening to her when we spoke on the phone. And to be fair, I often didn’t. She had a habit of drifting off into the details of her day and I usually had the details of my own day on my mind. But this time there was something different in her tone of voice. Something hostile. And threatening.

“Alan?”

“I’m here, Jenny.”

“You need to find time to call them soon. Now more than ever. Do you or do you not have the name and number?”

“Text it to me and I’ll call and leave a message late tonight. I’ll have to look at my calendar and find a good time for a vacation day. Are there any days in the next two weeks I should avoid being gone?”

Jenny and I had long ago synchronized our calendars, but she filled hers up with so many tentative appointments and reminders that I could never tell what was adjustable and what was carved in stone. If she needed me to do something, the only surefire way of confirming that was to ask her, assuming nothing.

“I’ll adjust. Pick the day that works best for you and get it done.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Do you want to talk to your son?”

“What, are we done?”

“Alan, I’m in the middle of about twelve things right now.”

It was funny how easy and difficult phone conversations with Jenny were. We’re married, and have been for enough years that getting down to business is simple and straight-forward, but even so, there are certain things that never seem to get said.

“How are you feeling today?” It suddenly felt like the most important question on earth.

“I’m fine. Don’t you have to get back to your conference?”

“No, it can run without me for a few more minutes. I want to know how you’re doing. I love you.”

“Well, I love you, too. And I really am feeling fine.”

“How’s Crazy Horse?”

“Fine. I have an appointment with Doctor Andrews this afternoon.”

“But nothing’s wrong?”

“No. Just a well baby check.”

“Okay. Let me know what they say.”

“I will. But don’t you dare call me until after you’ve spoken to Quest Partners.”

Before I could respond one of the doors to the ballroom burst open and Bethany Bishop appeared. She looked quickly left, then right, and, spotting me, violently motioned for me to come inside.

“Got to go, honey.”

“Sure. Talk to you later.”

“Alan!” Bethany shout-whispered at me. “We need you!”

I was already moving towards her, tucking my phone back in my pocket. “What is it?”

“Doctor Lancaster is freaking out!”

That didn’t sound good. As soon as I stepped inside the ballroom, Lancaster’s amplified voice filled my world, and it didn’t sound kind and pleasant like it had in the speaker ready room.

“Hello?” it said caustically. “Is there anyone there? Can someone please fix my slide?”

I looked up at one of the delay screens and quickly took in a complicated scatter diagram of some kind. Then I looked back to the AV riser and saw a flurry of movement and activity. Amidst the murmur of an audience interrupted, I practically leapt up the riser stairs.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

“His slide’s in backwards,” Ray said. “I need to pull the carousel and reverse it.”

“Hello?” the voice continued to taunt. “Is anyone back there?”

“Go!” I said, and Ray leapt off the riser and practically sprinted over to where he had previously set up the 35mm slide projector.

I looked up and saw the perspectively diminutive form of Dr. Douglas Lancaster at the far front of the room, on our stage, standing behind our podium, his hand up to shield his eyes from our spotlight, peering with difficulty into the darkness for someone to help him.

“Give me the VOG mic,” I said to the AV tech stationed by a soundboard larger than my kitchen table.

Without question, he picked up a handheld microphone, switched it on, and handed it over to me.

“We’re attending to the problem now, Doctor Lancaster,” I said into it, my voice booming like the voice of God out over the ballroom sound system.

“Well, thank heavens,” Dr. Lancaster said. “It appears I haven’t been abandoned after all.”

A nervous chuckle rippled through the room, and suddenly all the projection screens went blinding white. Looking over, I saw that Ray had popped the slide carousel off the projector and was in the process of plucking the offending slide out of its slot so he could reverse it.

“Oh my!” Dr. Lancaster gasped. “That’s not better, that’s worse!”

“One moment, please,” I said as calmly as I could into the microphone, but Ray was already clicking the carousel back into place, and as quick as that the slide with the complicated scatter diagram was back on all the screens.

“Eureka!” Dr. Lancaster exclaimed. “That’s what we’re supposed to be looking at. Now, if I can bring everyone back to where we left off, I wanted to point out this large cluster of data points in the upper left quadrant -- and, indeed, now it is actually in the upper left quadrant!”

Dr. Lancaster continued his presentation, the audience quieted back down into its typical somnolence, but I continued to stand there on the AV platform with the live VOG mic in my hand. Ray returned and stood by my side, but made no other movements and spoke no words. We undoubtedly were both waiting for the same thing.

As quietly as I could, I clicked off the microphone, but did not yet release it. “Is that the only one that’s going to be backwards?”

“Beats me,” Ray said. “He’s the one who loaded them.”

We stood and listened to Dr. Lancaster describe at length and in great detail what he often described as the “surprisingly elegant” meaning of his small and scattered clusters of data. I can’t speak for Ray, but I know the elegance was lost on me. The population density of Rwanda, the emergence of diseased allele pairs in Hawaiian Geese, the frequency of dangling participles in 19th Century Russian literature -- he could have been talking about any or all of these things and I couldn’t have told you. I was simply waiting for him to advance to the next slide.

“And so,” Dr. Lancaster eventually said, “if we look at the same data set six months later, we see...” There was a flutter on the slide carousel behind us and the image on the screen switched in a flash of white light, a similar but different eye chart, the clusters of blue data points in an alternate configuration, but the words, the words on the x and y axes, fortunately, thankfully, and happily, in the proper orientation. “...that much has changed. What was dominant has now become sub-dominant, and what was sub-dominant has all but disappeared.”

I handed the microphone back to the guy behind the soundboard. 

“Stay on it, Ray,” I said. “If he put one in wrong, there might be more.”

“Will do, Alan. Sorry, man.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t your fault. I’ll stay close until his presentation is over.”

Ray nodded solemnly. He looked grateful, like I had just packed him a fresh bowl. I just sat myself down on one of the empty chairs on the AV riser. Something inside me told me the threat was over, that this one slide was the only one that Lancaster had loaded backwards, but that same thing told me to stick around regardless. It was only one slide, but one slide was going to be enough. There would be all kinds of hell to pay.

9

When the keynote session was over, close to two thousand people had to get themselves out of the ballroom and off to their chosen lunch activity. For a great majority of them, that meant attending one of the twenty lunch sessions that we had planned as part of the conference schedule. These were highly coveted opportunities, both for the meal provided, but also for the small, discussion-based nature of the activity. We’d recruit in a recognized expert in one of twenty topic areas and limit attendance to no more than twenty participants, all in an attempt to preserve an environment where a kind of roundtable discussion could take place. 

Twenty sessions of twenty people each meant that only 400 people could be accommodated, leaving 1,600 or more to fend for themselves, seeking lunch in one of the hotel outlets, nearby restaurants or food trucks, or hospitality functions organized by the exhibitors. With so many people heading off in so many different directions, the foyer outside the ballroom frequently resembled a busy subway platform, and through the years we had come to understand the value of placing staff members at strategic flow points to serve as guideposts and gatekeepers.  

“Where’s the session with Dr. Maplethorpe!” one conference-goer shouted at me as she quickly approached, seemingly pulled along more by the current of bodies than her own volition.

“Up one level and down the hall to the left!” I shouted back, pointing towards a flight of escalators where a bottleneck was already forming.

Like a lot of the staff, I enjoyed complaining about the herd mentality that possessed otherwise intelligent people in these circumstances. To control access to the twenty lunch sessions they were ticketed, with each ticket costing the ticket holder forty dollars in addition to the conference registration fee they had already paid. This caused a lot of grousing, the average conference attendee oblivious to the fact that the lunches that came out of hotel banquet kitchens could easily cost forty dollars or more. On each ticket, which we painstakingly stuffed in the registration envelopes each attendee received at the start of the conference, we printed all the information they could possibly need about the session they were attending. The day, the time, the room location, the session number, the session title, the discussion leader -- they were all there in their laser-printed glory. And, if anyone cared to turn the little piece of cardboard over, they would see a miniature reproduction of the appropriate floor of the convention hotel, where some underappreciated human being had actually affixed a small red star in the box that represented the session’s room location.

But no one, it seemed, looked at these tickets, or tried to decipher the curious markings they contained. Why bother? When it was so much simpler just to shout “Where’s the session with Dr. Maplethorpe!” at the nearest idiot wearing a staff badge?

I and four other staff people served in this capacity for fifteen minutes or more, and, when the flow of people out of the ballroom slowed to a trickle, we all rushed off to our next assignments. The lunch sessions would be starting in another ten minutes or so, and we had to make sure the rooms, discussion leaders, and participants had everything they needed. With five staff people and twenty sessions, we had each been assigned four rooms to monitor. My four were down the same hallway as those assigned to Caroline Abernathy, which I thought meant I was going to have to cover all eight, but when I turned into the corridor I saw Caroline standing there, engaged in a heated argument with an attendee.

“Get out of my way!” the attendee, who I could only see from behind -- a man in a wrinkled sport coat with frizzy white hair -- was shouting at Caroline, who stood, along with the redcoat we had hired to collect the session tickets, in the doorway of the room.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Caroline said, her voice a strange kind of shaky calm, “this session is for ticket holders only. Do you have a ticket?”

“NO I DON’T HAVE A TICKET!” the man shouted.

Both Caroline and the elderly redcoat who could have been her grandmother seemed to tremble under the buffeting winds of his angry voice.

Knowing there was nothing I could do that Caroline wasn’t already doing, but wanting to take some of the pressure off her young shoulders, I stepped into the fray.

“Can I help you, sir?”

The man whirled like he was in a street fight. “What? Who the hell are you?”

His appearance gave me a momentary pause. I recognized him, and it took me half a second to remember from where. He wasn’t wearing the Pink Panther tie he had been wearing the last time I saw him, but it was the same guy. The goofball that had tried to derail Eleanor’s chosen speaker at the leadership meeting I had attended earlier in the year. I looked at his name badge, hanging from a string of Mardi Gras beads around his neck. Roger Rockhammer.

I told him my name and my title, and then took him by the elbow to try and steer him out of the flow of traffic that was still trying to get down the hallway to the other lunch sessions.

He shrugged me off. “Get your hand off of me!” he shouted. “Now, you listen to me. I came all the way from New Mexico to attend this session, and you’re not keeping me out of it.”

“But, Mr. Rockhammer,” I said as politely as I could. “This session requires a ticket and you didn’t purchase one.”

“I’ll buy one now,” he said, reaching for and producing a wallet that, I kid you not, had a cloth decal of the Tasmanian Devil stitched on it.

“The session is already sold out,” I told him, not bothering to check that fact with either Caroline or her grandmother. All the lunch sessions were always sold out.

“But there are empty seats in there!” he pleaded, his arm shooting out to indicate the interior of the session room and almost hitting Caroline in the forehead.

I instinctively looked into the room and saw the expected conference table set for twenty, the ensemble practically filling the small meeting room, with perhaps fifteen or sixteen people sitting shoulder to shoulder in fifteen or sixteen of the chairs, some already munching on a salad that a beleaguered banquet captain struggled to place in front of each. None of that surprised me. Not the tight set and not the handful of empty chairs. What did surprise me was the person who was sitting at the very head of the table, in the position typically reserved for the session’s discussion leader.

It was Eleanor Rumford. She was sitting there, silent and unmoving, a fork in one hand, but her salad as yet undisturbed. For a heart-stopping moment, her eyes locked with mine, and I knew what I had to do.

“Mr. Rockhammer,” I said, turning back to him. “I’m very sorry, but this session is sold out and those seats are reserved for ticket holders.”

He quickly inhaled and opened his mouth, but I raised my voice and rushed into my next sentence.

“No, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to ask you to leave this session before you create a disturbance.”

His face turned red with the insult, but before he could sputter another protest, another attendee approached from my right. As if I had pre-arranged it, he held up a ticket and I took it from him while Caroline stepped slightly away from the doorway to allow him into the room.

“There, you see,” I said. “Ticket holders are still arriving. Every chair will be full in the next few minutes. Now, really,” I said, taking him more firmly by the elbow, “why don’t we go down to the registration desk and see if we can accommodate you in one of tomorrow’s sessions.”

“I came here to attend this session!” Rockhammer cried, but offered no other resistance to my coaxing. In a moment I had him moving back down the hall, and a moment after that we were on the escalator together, practically alone in going down while a swarm of people were still jostling each other to go up in single file. When his legs stopped moving his lips started moving again. He protested the treatment he was receiving, loudly, I thought, more for the benefit of the friends and colleagues he might be passing on the escalator than out of any true sense of injustice.

I let him have his say, standing as stoically as I could on the escalator step just above him. We were moving in the right direction, after all, and I suspected that I might have already scored the necessary point. Down the upstairs hallway, in a small and cramped meeting room without any windows, I could imagine Eleanor Rumford starting her session, pleased that someone had delivered her from contact with her boorish nemesis.

10

The rest of the conference day went pretty much like that. Something would happen and it would be bad and I would feel like the world was about to crash down all around me. Then something else would happen and it would be good and I would feel like I had redeemed myself in the eyes of all the ever-watchful judges. And then something else would happen and it would be bad again and I would feel like I was back in the soup. To borrow a term, it was bipolar, but that’s what working that conference was like. You were juggling more balls than you had ever juggled before and surviving on four hours of sleep a night. 

The truth, of course, is that everything -- the good and the bad and everything in between -- was all in your sleep-deprived mind. No one was watching what you were doing. They were all too busy juggling their own balls.

I had a few spare moments before having to babysit the evening sessions, so I went back to my hotel room to use the restroom and splash some water on my face. There were plenty of restrooms in the convention space, of course, but they were always full of conference goers, and sometimes I just needed a break from all their questions and demands. I’ve been accosted in the men’s room before, attendees recognizing me or my staff badge and deciding the urinals were a great place to lodge their complaints. Really? Can’t you even wait until I’m done peeing?

Before relieving myself I fished my phone out of my pocket and saw that I had a text waiting. I flipped it open and saw that it was from Jenny.

Quest Partners. 617-345-8721. Call Pamela Thornsby.

I looked at my watch. It was 5:37 PM. Florida was the same time zone as Boston so there was a chance that Pamela might still be in the office.

“Hello, this is Pamela Thornsby.”

“Hello, Pamela. This is Alan Larson calling.”

“Alan! How are you? Your wife said you were working a conference this week?”

“Yes,” I said, her voice and the pressure in my bladder suddenly reminding me of how badly I had had to urinate the last time I spoke to Pamela, and how badly I thought I had screwed up her interview. “I’m in Miami Beach.”

“Lovely! I hope you’re finding a few moments to enjoy yourself.”

“It’s been pretty busy,” I said, “but I wanted to make sure I returned your call.”

“I’m glad you did. Listen, we’d like to bring you out to Boston soon to meet with the members of our Search Committee. Would you be able to do that sometime shortly after you get back from your conference?”

“I think so,” I said, already moving out of the bathroom. “Let me look at my calendar.”

“We’d be looking for about four hours of your time,” Pamela said as I found my briefcase and pulled my calendar out. “Either a morning or an afternoon. Whatever works best for you.”

“Uh huh,” I said, flipping pages until I found the right week. “It looks like next week Thursday and Friday are fairly clear. But I haven’t looked at any flights yet.”

“Well,” Pamela said, “we can accommodate almost any itinerary you can set up for next week Thursday or Friday, so why don’t you look into flights and email me all the details when you have them.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, flipping my calendar closed and stuffing it back into my briefcase. I should have peed before calling her, I realized belatedly.

“Email me a copy of your receipt for the airfare, too. Quest Partners will reimburse you for the expense.”

“That’s great,” I said quickly.

“And if your itinerary requires an overnight stay, let me know that, too. We can book a reservation for you at the closest hotel.”

“Okay,” I said. “Will do.”

“All right, then, Alan,” Pamela said, her voice signaling that she was about finished with her business. “I’ll watch for the next message from you. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call.”

“I will.” Questions? Did I have any questions? “Thanks.”

“Good luck at your conference. We’ll see you next week.”

I might have said good-bye, I might not have. There were suddenly so many things flying through my mind I would never be sure. The line clicked off and I was alone with those thoughts. 

Where in Boston was I going? Would I have to rent a car? How many people were on the Search Committee? Who were they? What questions were they going to ask me? Should I bring anything? What should I wear? Was I going to wet my pants? How badly was I going to screw up this time?

I didn’t have long to stew, nor even to pee. I hadn’t even dropped my phone back into my pocket before it rang again. Looking down at the tiny screen, I could see that it was Mary calling.

“Hello?”

“Alan?”

“Yes?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in my hotel room.”

Mary paused. Then slowly, “Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m just freshening up.”

“Are you coming down to the evening sessions?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. Eleanor and I would like to talk to you.”

Fuck. “Where are you?”

“We’re outside the junior ballroom.” Where you’re supposed to be. “Can you meet us soon?”

“Yes. Give me five minutes.” Or ten. I really had to go.

“Okay.”

This time I was sure I didn’t say good-bye. Neither did Mary.

11

Thirteen minutes later I was sitting at one of the banquet tables that were in the process of being set for one of the evening sessions. These were major undertakings, each sponsored by one of the corporate supporters that Mary spent most of her time wooing, each featuring presentations from the biggest names in their fields, and each scrupulously set to serve a preliminary dinner to no less (and no more) than 300 people.

Three hundred people meant thirty banquet rounds of ten settings each. Each table would have its own server, male and female alike in starched white shirts, each grouping of five tables supervised by a banquet captain in black coat and tie. Now, twenty-four minutes prior to door opening, those sixteen people were working furiously, darting between, and servicing the tables. The linens, plates, flatware, and glasses were all in place; the baskets of bread, pads of butter, and pre-set salads being dropped with clockwork efficiency.

Searching for a place for a private conversation, Mary and Eleanor had brought me here, and now the three of us sat in three consecutive chairs at one of these tables, the floral centerpiece posing too great a barrier for a conversation sitting opposite each other. Eleanor, dressed as if attending an opera, sat to my immediate left; Mary just beyond, each of us with our bodies turned in such a fashion to maintain eye contact with one another.

“Alan,” Eleanor began, patting my hand on the table like her star pupil. “I’m so glad we were able to find these few moments to connect on what has surely been a hectic and successful day.”

Eleanor’s eyes were smiling, but behind her permed hair I could see Mary’s eyes studying me, and there were no smiles there at all.

I had no idea how to play this. The tension in the air felt like Eleanor had a gun in her pocketbook. I smiled as sweetly as I could, returning Eleanor’s pat on the hand. “Me, too.”

Eleanor slowly drew her hand back. “I suppose I should start by thanking you.”

“Thanking me?”

“Yes. For the way you handled Mr. Rockhammer at lunch today. I trust you were able to find another session for him to attend?”

“Absolutely,” I lied easily, knowing the facts would not be checked, since this compliment was little more than a smokescreen. “He was very pleased with the re-accommodation.”

“I’m glad,” Eleanor said, her smile so genuine that for a moment I wondered if I had read her intentions correctly. “But there is another matter we must discuss.”

An uncomfortable silence settled down among the three of us, the constant sound of clinking glasses and dropped plates rising to prominence. I think Eleanor was waiting for me to speak first, to acknowledge the unfortunate incident, to admit my failure, to beg her forgiveness -- but I decided not to give her that satisfaction.

“Oh?”

Eleanor’s smile disappeared. “Yes,” she said. “I’m speaking of the embarrassment with Doctor Lancaster’s slides.”

I nodded. “Yes,” I said easily, adopting a tone as if we were blue bloods commiserating on the club lounge running out of our preferred brand of gin. “That was unfortunate. A simple mix-up, really. One that was easily corrected.”

I was trying to head a drubbing down off at the pass, but I could already see by the look on Eleanor’s face how unlikely that outcome was going to be.

“Alan,” Eleanor said seriously. “Doctor Lancaster was embarrassed in a lecture hall filled with his peers and admirers. Do you not understand the gravity of that situation?”

I took the smile off my face and matched Eleanor’s stern countenance. “Of course I do.”

“I’ve spoken to Mary and she tells me that the plenary session was your responsibility.”

Of course she did. I looked at Mary and she looked back impassively. She had either gone deaf or had bought a new poker face in the hotel gift shop. And this time I knew Eleanor wasn’t going to speak again until I did.

“Yes,” I admitted. “That’s true.”

“Then can you help me understand what happened? I’ve spoken to Doctor Lancaster and he is rightfully upset.”

At the mention of Dr. Lancaster’s name, I remembered the jovial and easy-going man I had dealt with in the speaker ready room. “I can talk to Doctor Lancaster if you like. Explain to him what happened and apologize.”

Eleanor started shaking her head as soon as I started talking. “No. I’ve already apologized on the organization’s behalf. So I think it would be best if I continue to be the one to deal with him. He wants an explanation. He’s entitled to one. But, Alan, I want to give him more than just an explanation. I want to give him evidence that such a thing will never happen to another speaker again.”

At that moment I was startled by a figure that had suddenly appeared at my elbow. It was a middle-aged man in an ill-fitting starched shirt and a bad toupee. He mumbled an apology and then started filling the water glasses on our table from a stainless steel pitcher, the ice clunking noisily into each goblet.

It gave me a second to reflect on what Eleanor had just said, and to realize how uncomfortable I was with her desire for evidence that such a thing would never happen again. What kind of evidence could she be looking for?

Eleanor’s hand was suddenly patting mine again.

“Alan, why don’t you just tell me how this embarrassing thing happened.”

She was speaking to me like she was my friend, and despite my inability to shake the suspicion that she was more like the cop asking the three-time loser to just confess or rat out his friends, I went ahead and told her, from my point of view, what happened. I told her about the discussion in the speaker ready room, about the creative solution we had come up with, and about Dr. Lancaster’s acceptance of it. None of it seemed to be what Eleanor was looking for.

“How did the slide get inverted?” she asked pointedly, before I had really finished my explanation, but after the banquet staff person had moved onto the next table, as if this was a line of inquiry that was not to be overheard.

I chose my words very carefully. “It was placed in the slide tray backwards.”

Eleanor wrinkled her nose. “Backwards? What do you mean backwards?”

I looked briefly at Mary. Does Eleanor really not understand how slide projection works? I tried to ask her with my eyes, but there was no response, nonverbal or otherwise.

“Opposite of the way it should have been,” I replied. “When the light shined through it to project an image, all the words appeared backwards. What was left should have been right and what was right should have been left.”

I was worried that my reply was too condescending, but Eleanor did not react negatively. She simply nodded with apparent understanding.

“I see,” she said. “And who was it that put this slide in backwards?”

The italics were clear in her tone, not like she was speaking ironically, but like she was speaking a foreign word she had just learned. I tried not to let it distract me, because I saw the trap she was about to spring on me. Tell the truth, say that Dr. Lancaster had put in his own slides, indeed, that he wouldn’t let anyone else touch them, and I would be besmirching the reputation and competence of her mentor and friend. That, I knew, would offend Eleanor’s sense of propriety. Giants like Douglas Lancaster did not make mistakes like this. Not, at least, when he had sycophants like Eleanor Rumford protecting his reputation.

I looked at Mary again, willing to take whatever guidance she might offer, and was surprised to see that she had something for me. The poker face was gone. Now her head was tilted and she was glaring at me, her directive as clear as the fire in her eyes.

Fall on your sword.

Yes. Of course. Because if Mary had ever tried to teach me anything, it was this. When your leader embarrasses themselves, you take the blame. That was more than just the secret to our success. It was practically our business model.

I considered it. And while considering it I realized the easiest thing to do would be simply to blame it on Ray. It was the AV tech, Eleanor. He loaded Doctor Lancaster’s slides and he must’ve made the mistake with that one. With Mary’s and now Eleanor’s eyes drilling into me, throwing Ray under the bus seemed not just like the easiest thing to do. It seemed like the right thing to do.

“Doctor Lancaster must have,” I said. “He gave us his carousel with his slides already loaded into it.”

The silence that followed these words was even deeper than the one we had experienced earlier. I purposely avoided looking at Mary, but I could not avoid Eleanor’s eyes. I could have been mistaken. My heart was beating so wildly in my chest that it would not surprise me if it blurred my vision. But it appeared to me that the tiniest little twinkle of a tear beaded up in the corner of her eye.  

“Did you not check them?” she asked me eventually.

“No,” I said. “There wasn’t time. He gave them to us just minutes before the session started. I’m awfully sorry, Eleanor.”

And I was, the feeling of regret as real as any I had ever felt.

Eleanor only nodded knowingly. “How did you discover the error?”

“I was told there was something wrong in the session room. As soon as I stepped inside, I saw what the problem was, and fixed it as quickly as I could.”

“Stepped inside?” Mary suddenly asked, speaking for the first time.

“Yes,” I said, a little startled. “I was out in the foyer.”

“What were you doing in the foyer when the plenary session you were responsible for was going on in the ballroom?”

And there it was. I had danced around several of them in the course of this conversation, but there, finally, was the trap I was fated to fall into. No. Not fated. Conspired. No matter what I did, Eleanor and Mary were determined to catch me in one of their snares.

“I was making a phone call,” I said.

“A phone call? To who?”

“To my wife.” 

“To your wife!” Eleanor exclaimed, her hand shooting out to cover mine again. “Is everything all right? Isn’t she expecting your second?”

At that point, I don’t know what surprised me more. The fact that Eleanor Rumford knew Jenny was pregnant, or the fact that they were going to use even that against me. Because here was another out, another chance to lie, to smooth things over. Actually, no, Eleanor. Jenny’s been struggling with pre-eclampsia and today her blood pressure went through the roof. She’s been hospitalized, and the baby isn’t far enough along to survive outside the womb. That excuses me, doesn’t it? Excuses me from this otherwise unforgivable sin? I’m sorry that I stepped out on the sacred responsibility of protecting Doctor Lancaster’s reputation and your ego, but I think my wife and my unborn baby might be dying.

No. Probably not.

“She is,” I said to Eleanor. “And thank you for your concern, but no, so far everything is going fine.”

“Then why were you calling her?” Mary asked.

I shrugged, deciding to continue addressing the boss, not her attack dog. “I was just checking in. The days here are so busy, I didn’t know when else I would get the chance. Everything with the session seemed to be going so well. I didn’t think--”

“No,” Mary interrupted viciously. “No, I guess you weren’t thinking, Alan. Eleanor,” she said, greatly softening her tone, “I’m very sorry about this. I’ll be sure to review our procedures with Alan, and from this day forward, we will have someone on our staff double check every slide before it is projected up on one of our screens.”

Eleanor raised her hand midway through Mary’s bootlicking. “Mary, please. I know that you will take the appropriate measures in this unfortunate situation. Alan committed a simple error in judgment. It happens. He is still growing in his position.”

Her voice was sweet, but it was laced with poison. She was clearly neither complimenting me nor excusing my behavior. Indeed, especially with her next words, I could see that she was signaling to Mary that she would be perfectly justified in getting rid of me.

“Alan, I know I told you earlier that we would no longer speak of your oversight on the conference program, but now I can’t help but feel that a pattern may be developing. Your hard work on our organization’s behalf is very much appreciated, but too many more slips like this may convince me that you lack the attention to detail that is necessary for a person in your position.”

“Oversight on the conference program?” Mary asked pointedly. “What oversight on the conference program is this?”

Before responding, Eleanor rose to her feet, compelling Mary and me to do the same.

“For now, Mary,” Eleanor said without taking her eyes off of me, “that is between Alan and me. Isn’t it Alan?”

Yes, you bitch. Between you and me and Lily Rasmussen’s gargoyles.

“Yes. Thank you, Eleanor.”

“Thank you, Alan.”

12

The dinner sessions went off without a hitch. If, by without a hitch, you mean we successfully sat and fed dinner to twelve hundred people, most of whom actually stayed to listen to at least the first speaker on their accompanying program. It was one of those all-hands-on-deck escapades, every spare staff person we had down in the ballroom foyer to direct traffic, take tickets, and, when necessary, escort people to available seats.

This is how it worked. Because these sessions were sponsored by our corporate donors, no fees were charged for the tickets. The donors wouldn’t let us, not wanting any barrier standing between their corporate messages and a room full of people. But because we wanted at least an estimate of how many people were interested in each session, we still required advance registration and the presentation of a ticket at the door. Sometimes the rooms we had available were of varying sizes, and this “no fee” ticketing procedure gave us the ability to make sure we were at least putting the most popular session in the largest room and the least popular one in the smallest.

Except, unlike the lunch sessions, where the vast majority of ticket holders showed up for their sessions -- they had, after all, paid forty dollars for that privilege -- when we didn’t charge anything for the ticket, long experience had shown us that at least a third of the people who had reserved tickets in advance would not, in fact, show up for their sessions. Sure, they checked the box on their registration forms, but that was weeks, if not months earlier, and they had no idea what they’d be doing or how they’d be feeling on the night in question, dazzled only by the tantalizing prospect of free dinners and famous speakers. But when the day finally arrived, many of those ticket holders would find themselves either too tired after a long conference day, or too enticed by the allures of a strange city worth exploring, or too inundated with invitations for competing dinner events -- from other sponsors, from new business partners, from old friends and colleagues -- that the thought of spending another two and a half hours in another hotel ballroom simply lost all of its appeal.

And I can’t say that I blame them. After all, a person can eat only so many rubber chicken dinners and look at so many slides.

So here’s how we had come to handle these sessions. We would set up a rope line outside of each session room; you know, a velvet rope connecting six or seven stanchions together, exactly like what you’ve seen outside of trendy night clubs. When someone came to the door without a ticket, we would ask them to stand behind the rope line until ten minutes passed the listed start time of the session. Then, based on quick count of vacant seats in the session room -- and, as I said, there were always vacant seats in the room, even if the session has been “sold out” -- we would let exactly that many people from the rope line in the room, letting them find a chair and get a late start on their pre-set salad.

It worked -- well. Over the years, we had honed this technique almost to a science. If I had had the gumption, I probably could have written the procedure up for a peer-reviewed journal -- something focused on the psychology of crowds, maybe, or the efficient processing of human actors through public policy initiatives -- and gone on the speaking circuit myself. It’s an elaborate production, especially when multiple sessions are taking place in rooms off the same foyer, and it requires every spare staff person to have the demeanor of a traffic cop and the willingness to treat people like herded cattle, but it works.

Every spare staff person, that is, except Mary Walton. Because on this particular evening, after their conversation with me, both she and Eleanor disappeared, not to be seen in any of the conference spaces until the following morning.

Once all four sessions were up and running, meaning the desserts had been dropped and the first speaker in each room was well into their presentations, four of us -- me, Bethany Bishop, Gerald Krieger, and Angie Ferguson -- gathered at a small separate table in a corner of one of the session rooms for a quick dinner of our own. Four other staff people were still on-duty in each of the four rooms, making sure nothing went awry. They were all junior staffers -- Caroline Abernathy and Jeff Hatchler among them -- and we would relieve them after our quick meal so they could eat and then be excused for the night. As the senior staffers, it was our role to babysit these sessions to their bitter ends. It was a policy that long predated Mary’s more recent promise to never allow another slide to be shown backwards.

In our situation, it was difficult, but not impossible to carry on a quiet conversation while we ate without being overheard or disrupting the session. And Gerald wasted no time.

“So, Alan. Have you done anything about the Wes Howard situation yet?”

I put my salad fork down. The tone. Already with the tone. Challenging and disrespectful. I was in no mood.

“I tried, Gerald, but Mary beat me to the punch.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that Mary has implemented her own solution to the problem as she understands it.”

“What does that mean?” This time it was Bethany asking the question, and I was suddenly glad she did. It reminded me that there were more things to worry about in this situation than just Gerald’s wounded sense of justice. I didn’t owe him anything. He would only try to goad me into some kind of action that would serve his own purposes, some kind of action I would likely come to regret, but there were others in the organization who deserved to know what was truly going on and what the organization actually thought about them. I looked into Bethany’s eyes and then into Angie’s, and despite the mouthful of Bibb lettuce Angie was busily chewing, I could see the same question clearly written on their faces. Are we safe?

No. You’re not.

“It means,” I said slowly, “that Mary doesn’t see the same problem that we do, so the thing that she’s done to address it doesn’t actually fix the problem we see at all.”

The three of them, including Gerald, seemed to need a moment to let the import of that sink in.

“What has she done?” Gerald asked.

“She talked to Wes and got him to agree not to bring Amy to any more of our functions.”

Another moment of silence. They were waiting for more.

“That’s it?” Bethany asked.

“That’s it,” I confirmed.

“But that doesn’t…”

“I know. That doesn’t do anything to keep Wes from assaulting other members of our staff.”

A third moment of silence. During it, I decided to start eating my salad again.

“What the hell are you going to do about this, Alan?”

It was Gerald, his tone even more threatening than before.

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“That’s not good enough, Alan. You’ve got a responsibility here.”

I felt tired. Maybe more tired than I had been in a long time. I said something I shouldn’t have.

“Oh, go fuck yourself, Gerald. Mary’s holding all of the cards on this one. You go talk to her if you think you can get a better deal.”

I’ll never know the look on Gerald’s face when I said this, because I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. Angry more at myself than this impossible situation, I simply stabbed a forkful of lettuce and crammed it into my mouth.

Nothing more was said on the subject for the rest of the dinner.

13

The glowing red numbers on the bedside alarm clock told me I got back to my hotel room at 11:17 PM that night. It had been a long and difficult day, but I was too tired to beat myself up over all the stupid things I had done. Tomorrow was just a few hours away -- I would need to set that damn alarm clock for 4:30 AM so I could tackle the second full day of the conference. If I remembered, I told myself, I would at least try to do fewer stupid things.

I quickly got ready for bed, taking time only to fold and hang my slacks carefully so they could be worn again tomorrow without ironing. The rest of my bedtime routine was done as quickly as possible, knowing without caring, for example, that as long as the majority of my teeth got brushed it would be good enough.

When I sat down on the edge of the bed I picked my cell phone off the end table in order to turn it off and connect it to the charging cord that I had already taken the time to plug in at the outlet behind the bed. The same stray thought that always entered my mind did. Why on earth was the only spare outlet in these hotel rooms hidden behind the bed? Forget about the needs of us weary business travelers, doesn’t the housekeeper need to plug in her goddam vacuum cleaner?

I looked at the small screen on the outside of my phone. 11:29 PM. One bar left in the battery indicator and it was flashing. 

Suddenly, the phone buzzed in my hands. I flipped it open.

U STILL UP?

It was a text from Bethany Bishop.

I looked at those letters for what felt like a long time, imagining Bethany sitting, probably not terribly far from where I sat, like me, on the edge of her hotel room bed in her night clothes.

Eventually, my heart racing, I shut down the phone without responding.

14

That was pretty much a typical day at our Annual Conference. Up before the break of dawn, disappoint just about everyone you come into contact with (most of all yourself), and collapse in your hotel room minutes before or after midnight. I was there for four more days after that first one, and they all went like that.

As the week wore on, however, there were fewer and fewer people to disappoint. The second day of the conference was typically the busiest, when the maximum number of people were there, cramming themselves into depressing hotel rooms by night and even more depressing meeting rooms by day, all for the fleeting chance at something they couldn’t get at home. For most, that was education -- a new perspective, a new way, a new lease on their professional lives. For a few, it was more about what happened between the sessions than in the sessions themselves. It was intense and lonely. Few could sustain it for more than two or three days. By the third day there were noticeably fewer people, by the fourth we were probably down to 60% of the total, and by the fifth and last day we approached actual ghost town status.

And as the attendees drifted away, so did the staff. At the beginning we had practically everyone there, every able body needed for some vital task, pushing registration envelopes into waiting hands or moving banquet chairs from one room to another to match unexpected demands. But with fewer attendees there were fewer such demands, and the company, always looking to save money, made sure no one outstayed their usefulness. Matching the pace of the attendees, a small group was dismissed at the end of the third day, including, much to my relief, Bethany Bishop; and a much larger contingent at the end of the fourth, including, much to my even greater relief, Mary Walton. On the fifth and final day, it’s safe to assume that we had little more than a skeleton crew left.

In fact, there were only four of us. Me, the captain of our tiny crew; Angie Ferguson, my executive officer, the person who actually knew how to run things on our sinking ship; and our two enlisted personnel, the two tasked with the actual bailing, Jeff Hatchler and Caroline Abernathy.

On that last day, our official duties wrapped up relatively early. With no dinner events planned, the conference closed up around 2:00 PM. We had to work a little longer than that, packing up boxes and making arrangements to ship them back to the office, but that didn’t take us long. And that was good, because we were all booked on the same flight back home, leaving Miami International that evening at 7:35 PM.

We had plenty of time to kill at the airport, so after clearing security, the four of us gathered in a corner of one of the airport bars and grill, this one pretending to specialize in Cuban sandwiches.

“Hey guys,” the waitress said, appearing at our table before all of us had even found our chairs. Her hair was curly and black, and piled high on top of her head. “What can I get you?”

“I need a beer,” Jeff said immediately.

What followed was a kind of odd silence. Even the waitress, gleaning apparently from our appearance that we were business travelers and, even more intuitively that I was the senior man on the totem pole, understood that this was a work function. If there was going to be alcohol served, I would need to okay it.

“Me, too,” I said.

Permission thus granted, the waitress began reciting everything they had on tap. Jeff selected one and I selected another. Angie ordered a glass of white wine, and Caroline a rum and coke.

“What about food?”

“Give us a minute,” I said, snatching the menu out of the cardboard six-pack holder that served as both the centerpiece and the caddy for the mustard and ketchup.

“You got it.”

It felt like I had just begun to decipher the menu -- my weary brain struggling with both its font and its phraseology -- when she returned with our drinks. 

“That was quick,” I said, this time catching the letters printed on her plastic name tag.

“Most people like fast service here,” Consuelo said, dropping a cardboard coaster in front of each of us before placing each drink. “What time is your flight?”

“Seven thirty-five,” Angie replied, snatching the stem of her wine glass before it could leave a ring on the coaster.

“You’ve got time,” Consuelo said. “Do you want to put an order in now, or wait a while?”

I didn’t even think to ask anyone. “Let’s wait. Come back in thirty minutes?”

“You got it.”

Everyone else kept studying their menus, but I put mine back in the caddy. I had already decided. When Consuelo came back, I was going to ask her which was her favorite item and order that. She looked both trustworthy and like she would have a firm opinion.

“I’d like to make a toast,” I said with mock formality, lifting my frosted beer glass into the air. I waited for everyone to respond in kind, and then, with as much good-hearted sarcasm as my tired voice could muster, I said, “To Miami Beach. May we all someday actually get to know her.”

It was a running joke in our company. It acknowledged what we all knew or eventually came to understand. Despite all the travel and beautiful locations we visited, we never truly spent any quality time in any of them. When it came to experiencing a destination, airports and convention hotels just didn’t count.

We all took a healthy swig of our respective drinks, mine more healthy than most. 

“I’d also like to make a toast,” Angie said before any of us could set our glasses down. 

“Indeed,” I said, raising my glass higher. “Be my guest.”

“A toast,” Angie said. “To you, Alan.”

“To me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you knocked the shit out of this conference. Short two staff people, and with the woman in the presidential suite rooting against you, and you still managed to pull off a win. You were everywhere you needed to be and you kept the damn thing from running off the rails.”

It was Angie’s way of giving a compliment. There wasn’t a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

“Just wanted you to know that some of us noticed.”

“Here, here,” Jeff said.

I didn’t know what to say. I looked from one of them to the other. Even Caroline seemed to be smiling at me. I knew then in my embarrassment that even though we had seen each other multiple times throughout the remainder of the conference, we had never since spoken about Wes Howard and what had happened at Club NOW.

“Thanks,” I said finally, reaching out and clinking each one of their glasses. I thought about asking Angie what she meant by the woman in the presidential suite rooting against me, but decided this wasn’t the time or place. “You guys did pretty well yourselves. Dinner is on me tonight.”

“So,” Jeff asked me after taking another long sip of his beer and plopping his glass down, a line of foam still on his lip. “Are you my boss now?”

Later, after we had eaten and we were sitting in the gate area waiting for our flight to board, I had a chance to talk quietly with Angie.

“Angie, what did you mean before about the woman in the presidential suite rooting against me?”

She let the crochet she was working on drop into her lap. “You don’t know?”

“I might,” I said. “I just want to hear you say it.”

“Eleanor Rumford,” she said, discreetly looking around to avoid being overheard. “She has it in for you.”

“In what way?”

Angie proceeded to tell me a little story. In this story, a woman named Eleanor Rumford came to her in the time between the mix-up with Dr. Lancaster’s slides and my own discussion with her and Mary before the dinner session, and asked her a bunch of leading questions about the performance and conduct of someone named Alan Larson.

“She was looking for dirt on you, Alan.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted me to say something negative about you; about the way you conduct yourself, or the decisions you make, or the things you do. I got the distinct impression she was planning to shoot you and was checking in case I had any bullets.”

“You didn’t give her any, did you?”

Angie picked up her project and started crocheting again, her thick fingers working quickly to stab and tug the yarn with a hooked needle.

“Nah, fuck her. Like I said, you’re one of the good ones, Alan.”

I thanked Angie, told her I appreciated her support, and then excused myself to go use the restroom. On the way I had to step over Jeff and Caroline, both sitting cross-legged on the floor, a couple of piles of playing cards fanned out between them. They might have said something to me. I might have even disturbed their game. I was too preoccupied to think much about my surroundings. Angie had defended me, and that was good, but I knew Angie was likely not the only person Eleanor had asked. As I made my way down the concourse, I found myself counting not my steps, as I habitually did, but the number of people in the company who might have been willing to put bullets in Eleanor’s gun.

+ + +

“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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