Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

  When Prescott returns with the coffee, I lay out the situation. I have been “consulting” for several years now and need to reconfigure myself for the corporate world, but have only the vaguest idea of how to proceed. Plus, I throw in, though I didn’t plan to, I’m concerned that I make no visual impression at all. This impression—an impression of an impression, really—stems from a newspaper profile of me some years ago, in which I was described as the kind of person whom no one would notice when she enters a room. At the time that had seemed like good news; at least I had figured out how to blend in. But now I need to leave some sort of memory trace in the people I meet. Prescott nods approvingly and congratulates me for coming to him: “Some job seekers neglect the visuals.”

  Furthermore, I confide, my exposure to corporate dress comes mostly from New York and San Francisco, where a black-based minimalism still prevails, whereas here in Atlanta, you see a lot of bright red accented with gold. He confirms this, adding that not only are there regional differences in corporate costuming, so are there differences from company to company. Some are extremely conservative; others he calls “corporate creative.” It is wise to know what the rules are before showing up for the interview, because you do, after all, want to look like a “team player,” right down to the team uniform. To find out what is expected, study any photographs of female executives you can find on the company web site or call and ask a receptionist to tell you what the power gals are wearing—unless, of course, it occurs to me, the receptionist hates the power gals and maliciously advises me to show up in harem pants and bustier.

  Now we proceed to the material at hand, which is me. As in so many of my coaching experiences, we begin by categorizing me as a “type,” only here no test is involved, only a quick allover survey by Prescott. I am “angular” in shape, he announces, and my face is shaped “like a diamond,” which suggests to me a pointy head, but in fact refers to my cheek-bones. They are “wonderful”; I can keep them. My hair and even the $3 earrings pass muster; they can stay too. As for my overall type, there are four possibilities: “classic,” which applies to people who always wear skirts, “are not very flexible, and tend to be Republican”; “romantic,” who “love flowing material”; “dramatic,” who “love to break rules” and are often “eccentric”; and “natural,” who are “outdoorsy, want to save owls and trees, love texture, and don’t wear a lot of patterns.” I turn out to be a natural, which seems to please Prescott, because “there’s less to change.” Fashion-wise, I am a kind of tabula rasa.

  The first problem is that I come across as “too authoritative” as a result of the combination of an “angular” body with a tailored shirt and the straight lines of my jacket lapel. “You want to look approachable, not authoritative, so people will feel comfortable working with you,” and this means curved lines, not straight ones.

  Decoding this diagnosis, I see that I am not looking feminine enough.10 This is, to say the least, confusing. The dress-for-success books all urge what I take to be a somewhat mannish appearance, achieved through pragmatic hairstyles and curve-concealing suits. But if you go too far in the masculine direction, Prescott is saying, you somehow err again. What could be threatening about a tailored shirt? I recall, from my other life as an amateur historian, that subordinated people often used imitation as a form of mockery; some nineteenth-century colonized Africans and enslaved black Caribbeans, for example, liked to strut around on festive occasions in the full regalia of British officers. Maybe an overly masculine office outfit on a woman sends the same kind of signal—as a sly mockery of the male-dominated corporate hierarchy.

  “As for body language,” Prescott continues, “the way you’re holding your hands on your waist, you seem to be holding something in.”

  This is true. I release one hand and send it over to pick up the coffee cup. But the other one must remain at its post, covering the gap in my zipper.

  “There needs to be a necklace to pull it all together,” he goes on.

  I protest that, with glasses, earrings, scarf, and brooch all vying for attention in the head and chest region, a necklace could be overkill. But no, a necklace will apparently be a peacemaker, not an additional contender.

  The recitation of flaws continues, almost faster than I can write them down. There’s the issue of suits: you cannot wear slacks with nonmatching jackets. The top and bottom must form a single unit, perhaps the better to resemble a military uniform. Charitably, he says nothing about the watch, just gently suggests that I go for a larger watch face, preferably with a gold band.

  He moves along to color in general, where I receive a major blow: I can never wear gray or black again, because they drain the color from my face. This pretty much condemns me to nudity, since my entire wardrobe is black and gray, and not because I’m striving for New York City-style coolness, circa 1995. The truth is I spill on everything, so no peach or yellow item has ever survived more than two or three wearings. Even my conservative silver brooch, a gift from my Norwegian publisher, is deemed “not corporate” by Prescott. All this time I had thought I was a perfectly presentable-looking middle-class professional, when in fact I must come across as a misfit, a mess.

  If Prescott wasn’t so perfect—so perfectly groomed, so perfectly discreet—this might be unbearable. I have plenty of excuses to offer, but of course I do not inflict them on him. Mainly, as a writer, I have no need to dress for work in anything other than gym clothes, or no clothes at all for that matter, and when writers do try to “dress up,” they are generally granted a lot of leeway. I remember attending a banquet with the poet and short-story writer Grace Paley, who appeared in a loose pink floral dress. When I complimented her, she confessed it was a nightgown, which was obvious on closer inspection.

  Finished with the assessment, Prescott leads me off to a second small, windowless room, where we sit at a counter facing a mirror to address the matter of cosmetics. He asks to see my current collection, so I am forced to display the contents of my makeup kit, as if this were an airline security check: two lipsticks, a tinted moisturizer, pressed powder, blush, mascara, and eyeliner. “Liquid eyeliner?” Yes, incredibly enough. Most of this must be tossed: The lipsticks contain hidden grays that are dragging me down; the blush is another carrier of lethal gray. The pressed powder, I am mortified to report, presents a slightly ridged surface that he identifies as a bacterial colony fed by oils from my skin. So all this time I have been patting my face with microbial scum. I can see that I am in for an additional splurge on his special line of makeup in addition to the $250 for our session.

  After I am deftly—and rather well, I must say—made up with his own concoctions, he places a kind of bolero consisting of layers of different color swatches around my neck, turning one over at a time, so that I appear to be dressed sequentially in brown, yellow, green, red, orange, peach, et cetera. “See that,” he says, turning to a forbidden hue—“how it’s making you pasty?” I agree that I resemble a cave dweller or corpse. Then he shows me a “good” color and insists that I acknowledge the rich, honey tones it imparts to my face. I again agree, although as far as I can see, I still look faintly tubercular.

  This should be the fun part—playing with paints and little swatches of fabric—but I am suddenly gripped by queasiness. I understand that to make myself into a “product” that I can market, I must first become a commodity, a thing. I further understand that the queasiness may simply be a follow-up to the Checkers’ bacon double cheeseburger I had for lunch. But there is an unmistakable pallor shining through the professional makeup job. What I had not understood is that to become an object, a thing, you must first go through a kind of death.

  I make some excuse about a four o’clock appointment and buy $55.50 worth of cosmetics with the assurance I can always order more of Prescott’s personal selections by e-mail. I get to keep my own mascara. Then I head back to the hotel, park, and start walking aimlessly past office towers and happy-hour joints, through nondescript neighborhoods and downto
wn parks, until the paint comes off my face in the rain.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I drive an hour or so outside of Atlanta to see Patrick. His office turns out to be in a shopping center anchored by a Kinko’s and a Chick-Fil-A, where I prime myself with an iced tea. I am dressed in the same clothes I wore for my image makeover, having refreshed the shirt by washing out the armpit areas in the sink and drying them with the blow-dryer, and I’ve memorized my major talking points: why he needs me, what I can offer, the bright future ahead. This strategy is based on the advice books, which urge you to research the prospective employer thoroughly in advance, then to use the interview—not to prattle on about yourself but to talk about what you can do for the company. Jeffrey J. Fox’s canny book Don’t Send a Resume, for example, explains encouragingly that “the company may not know it needs you”—until, that is, you outline “five or six ways the company could be improved.”11 Hydraulic fluid leaks? Overly long shipment times? You point out these defects and explain how you’ll fix them.

  But something has gone badly wrong with the plan, I see as soon as I enter his office, which is located right above a Chinese take-out place. I envisioned an office suite, staffed at least by a receptionist, and containing a sort of boardroom where the ExecuTable insiders would gather periodically for coffee and croissants. But Patrick opens the door himself, revealing a room the size of a walk-in closet. He seems to have deteriorated significantly from the voluble guru of boot camp. He’s wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, as if in conscious defiance of corporate propriety, and has the puffy, pained look of a man who’s been recently boiled.

  When I am seated on the couch, he inquires as to the status of my search. For a moment, I am almost too overwhelmed by the death-of-a-salesman vibe to respond. I should make some excuse and flee. I should admit to even greater “obstacles” than I had revealed at the boot camp and submit to a normal coaching session. It doesn’t look to me as if he could afford to hire even a cleaning lady, not that such a person would find any clear surfaces to clean here anyway, what with the clutter of pop-psych and self-improvement books stashed on the desk and rising from the floor. But I am programmed to proceed and cannot deviate from the Plan. In the spirit of a person who has walked to the end of the plank and is taking her first steps out onto air, I announce, “Patrick, I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve studied your video and my notes from the boot camp, and I think you should hire me. You need a PR person. You need an image makeover. And I’m the person to do it.”

  Getting no response except for a sudden neck twitch that seems to be addressed to a muscle pain, I plunge into my prepared pitch: The career coaching industry can only expand. Whether or not the economy improves. And this is because the corporate world has changed. Today, in the wake of the last recession, companies are intent on being permanently lean; they churn people in and out as needed, so that the average executive or professional can expect to hold—what?—about ten or eleven jobs in a lifetime whether he or she wants to or not.12 And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that our society is so unprepared for this change. College, for example, prepares people for jobs, but not for the trauma of job change. Hence the huge long-term market for career coaching, which Patrick is poised to conquer. There’s big money to be made. Very big.

  “I was the first career coach,” he interjects tonelessly. “I started in the seventies, before all the rest of them came along.”

  “Fine.” Now I think I have him where I want him. He’s accepting my framework for this event, or at least he’s not imposing his own, and this gives me the courage to rattle on: You have a gift. Anyone can see that. Many things can be learned, but the way he works with people, which I saw at the boot camp, that’s not something that can be learned. The ability to look at a person and really see what’s going on with them. When I watched him at the boot camp, I couldn’t believe he wasn’t a trained psychotherapist.

  “Well, I am. I’ve done that.”

  The flattery is working, and—who knows?—there is an out-side possibility that he might be able to raise the money to hire me from some of his executive contacts. But you’re more than a psychotherapist, I continue, “because you can galvanize a whole group at the same time. That’s called charisma. That’s something you have or you don’t. You’re born with that. It comes from inside.”

  “I know,” he says, addressing the bookshelf. “I have a gift.”

  “The thing is, Patrick,” I say as gently as possible, “you’re stuck.” That’s his word and his central theme in the “sweet spot” video—dealing with people who are stuck.

  “Like look at that boot camp,” I continue. “Now I don’t know what your plan is, your mission, and if you want to tell me it’s to reach the laid-off sixty-five-K-a-year middle manager, fine, I have complete respect for that. It’s an important demographic, and I can respect you if your mission is to work with them. I admire you for that.” I am trying to suggest that his operation might as well be the Salvation Army, and he is twisting his neck again, so all I can see is the corner of his eyes.

  “But,” I go on, “that’s not where the money is. If you’re looking to make money, you have to aim for the one- to two-hundred-K person. And that’s where I can help you.”

  “But we’re here to talk about Barbara Alexander,” he says, tapping the legal pad on his lap.

  “We are. We’re talking about what she can do for you.” I have never before in my life spoken of myself in the third person, but then this emerging Barbara Alexander person is not exactly myself, or anyone I would want to know. Maybe the makeover is kicking in, or maybe it’s Patrick’s own philosophy, which I acquired at boot camp: EP varies exponentially with PSWB, meaning that my inner self-confidence can bend the world to my will. Clearly thrown off, he gets up and moves to the desk chair, as if to reabsorb his lost authority through the seat of his pants.

  “Let’s talk about your video, the one about the sweet spot. It doesn’t work. Terrible production values. And look at the semiotics of it—that’s a word we use in PR,” I tell him, amazed at my own creativity. “You’ve got a bunch of people that you’re supposedly interacting with, inspiring, and all we see is the backs of their heads.”

  “I only had one camera.”

  I shrug. “Why didn’t you invest more in something so important?”

  “But there was great energy in the room.”

  “Maybe, but the viewer doesn’t see it. They don’t get a hint of your charisma.”

  Since he seems to accept this, I plunge deeper. What else is there to do, now that I’ve started, except to see the plan through? “The other thing is that I do coaching on public speaking. You’re very, very good, but you could be better. Trouble is, you tend to flub your anecdotes; you let them dribble away; you don’t draw the point. I can help with that. You need a crisper approach.”

  “So . . . you . . . want,” he says, letting each syllable struggle to find its way out, “to . . . market . . . me.”

  If it weren’t for the sepulchral tone of this utterance, I might be annoyed. Where has he been for the past twenty minutes? But it’s clear I’m not just dealing with a severe case of narcissism here. Right before my eyes, a man is being sucked down into some dark sticky substrate of the mind. I want to save him. I also—where is this coming from?—want to push him down deeper into the enveloping muck. “Listen to yourself,” I say, leaning forward, “how your voice falls when you say that. What I’m picking up on here is depression.”

  If he can be a psychotherapist, so can I. If he could reduce Cynthia to tears with a diagnosis, I can offer one of my own. At any moment, of course, he’s free to say, “Look, I’ll do the coaching here, thank you very much,” and crush my chutzpah under his heel.

  “It’s the sleeping pills I’m taking; they make me like this.”

  Aha, further vulnerability! I have the sense now of being engaged in a life-or-death struggle; whose grift will prevail? I return to my qualifications as a PR person, the brilliant nation-wide successe
s, the careers I have helped launch. He could still win if he could find the strength to patronize me, as in: “That’s great, now I want you to go out and try this on a real potential employer”—perhaps accompanied by an indulgent chuckle. But no, he has to get defensive: “You haven’t seen anything of my true gifts,” he says, “just this much”—indicating the tip of his pinky.

  I acknowledge my ignorance as to the true extent of his gifts.

  “You’re saying a lot of things, but you don’t know what I’ve been going through recently,” he says, and moves on to a list of explanations that would be laughed out of his own boot camp as “excuses.” There was a “business divorce” involving a sudden loss of assets. He had to find another apartment and move to this smaller office. Three long-term clients unexpectedly bailed. As for the boot camp, with its population of $65K guys, that was not typical for him. He just “cherry-picks” the boot camps to get people for his ExecuTable. That’s where he makes his real money.

  Inspired by his own defense, he makes another attempt to seize power: “But you’re here for some coaching, right?”