CHAPTER thirty-five
Vanessa was furiously punching her phone when I stopped by her office. I sat down in one of the guest chairs and flipped through a magazine she had in her basket. It was a trade magazine, all about the world of high tech. The cover story was about the next chairman of Elite Technologies. Elite was the latest and greatest in high tech companies and had been founded by a handful of young, preppie programmers who had left Microsoft or IBM or Apple, I couldn’t remember. It was the latest darling of Wall Street and was in the news almost every week. I checked the inside index and found the page number for the cover story.
I glanced at the pictures accompanying the story and read the captions underneath. The writers had compiled a list of who they were touting to be the next president of Elite. The preppie programmers had finally decided that they didn’t like managing their company, they liked the development side so the word was out that they were looking for a business-minded, technical-type to captain their ship for the next while. Business-minded, tech weenie. What an oxymoron! I recognized a few of the faces in the article and remembered a few years back when IBM was searching for their next president and the Wall Street Journal had done a similar article.
Some joker at our PR firm had taken the Wall Street Journal article that had about six or seven pictures of likely candidates in it, and had pasted a picture of Chris Oakes in one of the spots. They had rewritten the caption under the picture and faxed it to Oakes, anonymously. The fax looked amazingly real and Oakes bought it. He actually believed it was his picture in the Wall Street Journal. He walked around the office showing everyone. I remember actually being embarrassed for the idiot. No one had the heart to show him a copy of the real Wall Street Journal which happened to be sitting in his in-basket.
I tossed the magazine back in Vanessa’s basket and stared at her, willing her to look at me. She was writing in her book and firing off instructions to someone on the end of the line. As I listened, I realized she was talking to someone at the Toronto Club where the directors were scheduled to have dinner that night.
"Right. Right. And the cigars. Don’t forget the cigars. Thanks." She hung up and slumped back in her chair.
"They don’t pay me enough for this shit," she said.
"Stop your bitching. You love it," I teased her.
"Just about as much as I love my ex," she shot back. She looked at her watch and sat back up in her chair. "I’m not going to make dinner tonight. Oakes wants me to deliver some shit over to the Club before the dinner. No way I can make it back by six."
"We’ll wait for you. Whatever Oakes wants, give it to the maitre d’ and hightail it out of there. Why can’t you just send it over by taxi?" I asked her.
"It’s stuff he needs to sign. A letter agreement with Jack Vincent."
"Ooh. Are we getting ready to mortgage the company again to pay little Jack his fees?"
"Whatever." She brushed me off.
"Not interested? Or not sharing?" I asked her.
"Not interested. We’ll talk later. I’ll be at Bigliardi’s as soon as I can. Thanks for waiting for me," she said. She stood up and started gathering up the papers on her desk. "Everything done for the meeting tomorrow?"
"I’ve got all the books together. How about you?"
Vee and I were a team when it came to the director's meetings. I got the materials for the meetings together and she looked after the physical requirements. If they needed laptops, projectors, conference telephone systems, TV monitors, or whatever, Vee looked after that.
I made sure all of the directors got to the meeting. Vee looked after them while they were there. Booking limos, hair appointments, golf tee times, you name it. Every one of their wishes was our command. Some of the tasks we performed for them were mundane, some were ridiculous and most were useless.
Like the time one of the directors who was very overweight, came out of the meeting with this hand on the back of his pants. We were out of town and holding the meeting in the penthouse suite of a very swank hotel. Vee and I were sitting at a large table outside the meeting room.
"Got a stapler?" he asked through his teeth that were clenched around a cigar.
"Yes," I said and held it out to him. He disappeared down the hall to the men’s room. When he returned he handed me the stapler and turned around and lifted up the back of his suit jacket.
"Can you tell?" he asked me. The idiot had torn the seam on the seat of his suit pants and had stapled it back together. On the outside.
"Not at all," I deadpanned. "Great job."
Vee and I laughed so hard we both had to run to the ladies room. Even funnier though was the next morning when he showed up for a committee meeting wearing the same pants. And they still had the staples in them.
Harold was packing the director's binders into a large legal briefcase when I wandered past his office.
"Everything in order?" I asked him when I stuck my head in the door.
"Fine. Thanks," he said. He closed the flaps on the top of the briefcase and threaded the leather handle through the hole in the top. He snapped the two buckles shut.
"Have fun then." Although he wouldn’t admit it, I knew Harold secretly looked forward to these dinners. The great, secret, male enclave. Farting and belching. Cigar smoke. Brandy. Hangovers in the morning. Ah, he probably thought, it doesn’t get any better.
"Kate, I’d like a word," he said. "Come in and close the door."
"Should I get my book?" I offered. If he was going to fire off instructions about work tomorrow or things that needed to be done, I had to write it down. I was never any good without my notes.
"No, no. Uhm," he cleared his throat. Harold was obviously uncomfortable about something and I knew he was going to talk about something unrelated to work. I closed the door and sat down.
At the best of times, it was hard for Harold to say good morning to me. He never asked me how my weekend was. Once, when I returned from a two week vacation, beautifully tanned and visibly relaxed, he hadn’t even asked me how my holiday was. At first I thought it was because he was ignorant. After a while though, I realized it was because he was very shy and didn't like to pry. And, he didn't really care.
I didn’t consider passing the time of day or asking how one’s weekend was, prying, but Harold did. And, we were not allowed to ask him anything personal. I knew he had a beautiful wife and two gorgeous children, but that was the extent of it. If he attended company functions, it was alone. He wasn’t like everyone else who bragged about their kids and had pictures of them plastered all over the place. I often wondered what he was like at home.
"Kate," he started. "I know this is none of my business." He was red in the face. I looked at him blankly. I had no idea where this was going and I was starting to feel as uncomfortable as he was obviously feeling.
He ran his index finger under his shirt collar.
"May I ask a personal question?"
If it was about my secrets on how to keep a goldfish alive, I wasn’t sharing.
"Sure. Shoot."
"Are you involved with Jay Harmon?" he blurted out.
Well. Word gets around fast, I thought and then I remembered that Harold had two eyes and had seen us at the funeral. Our first date in front of probing eyes, I thought bitterly. What business was it of his?
"Yes," I said through a closed mouth. My hands curled into fists on my lap and I felt the sweat starting to bead on my palms. Calm down, Kathleen I told myself. You and Jay are both over twenty-one and single. You were going to announce it proudly from the observation skydeck at the CN Tower. Maybe he’s going to tell me how happy he is for the both of us. Not fucking likely.
"Well, that puts me in an awkward position," Harold said.
"How so?"
"Confidentiality. The deal that’s about to happen. You know," he said.
"No I don’t know, Harold. How about you tell me?" I thought about the pinkie sw
ear the night before and the information I had shared with Jay. Sister Josephine was about to tear my right ear off. I knew it.
"I don’t need to remind you of your role in this company and the information you are privy to," Harold said. I made a mental note to remind him not to end his sentences with a preposition.
"No, you don’t."
"Mr. Harmon was fired on Sunday and that puts us in an even more awkward situation," he informed me.
"Get to the point, Harold."
"I’ll be unable to have you work on this deal with me unless you can give me assurances that I can rely on your discretion and trust that you’ll keep everything confidential."
"Fine. I get the point. You know, and I know, that I need this job Harold. You also know that you can trust me. I may be sleeping with the man," I said as I stood up, "but I don’t talk in my sleep."
We stared at each other across the desk.
"Will that be all, sir?" I asked. I emphasized the sir. He nodded.
I didn’t slam the door on the way out. It would have been a useless gesture. I knew Harold was right and I was mad at myself. I shouldn’t have told Jay anything, pinkie swear or not. I had broken a confidence, a trust that Harold had in me.
This time I didn’t make a mental note. I swore to myself that my days of sharing information were over.