Fortune Is a Woman (14 page)

Venus went along with the formality. “A pleasure to meet you,” she said, gripping her empty punch glass with both hands.

Board of Directors. Nice work. She’d be perfect for it. “The pleasure,” Lydia replied, “is all mine, I can assure you.” Wasn’t that something gallant Edward might say? The pleasure is all mine?

Helaine smiled. “Very good then. Shall we go?”

Arms and Ability

Once and for all, rule number one, public speaking: THE MIKE IS ALWAYS ON.

She despised them and they knew it, a hate-hate relationship that had sprung from the Chambers/Kristenson/Beaumont affair, way back in the early days when they didn’t know her name yet, when they simply called her Jane Doe.

Lydia stood on the podium Tuesday morning, the press gathering around like vultures, the corporate logo on an enormous banner behind her snapping in the breeze like a whip. It was supposed to be a joint news conference this morning, but Paula was nothing but a scoundrel and enough time had gone by for Lydia to deduce that she wasn’t showing up. Paula Treadwell who was never late for anything was late today, which could only mean that she had never planned on being there at all.

Lydia had held up the crowd waiting for her and they were restless now, chomping at their bits, ready to stampede, whatever it is that a pack of animals do. Lydia gritted her teeth at them in a kind of skeletal grin, the best she could offer under the circumstances. Flashes. Cameras. It was all coming back to her. Why she despised them so much. Why she did not want this job.

“Ms. Beaumont! Hey! Ms. Beaumont!”

There were intermittent hoots and howls and these were becoming more frequent with every passing minute. She would have to deal with the reporters alone. Paula had hung her out there all alone. It was not her specialty being a spokesperson, the front woman. Paula was much better at it.

“Hey, give us a nice big smile, won’t you?”

No.

She wiped the phony grin off her face and tapped at the microphone. There was a breathy sound from the speakers at her sides, a
boom boom
and then a piercing squeal. She stepped away from the apparatus while the technician made adjustments for her. By the time he had it fixed the press had settled down a bit.

Joint President Beaumont leaned into the mike and said, “Good morning,” as cheerfully as possible. “Good morning,” she repeated, finally giving them that nice, big smile.

The crowd swooned. They were going to have fun with Lydia Beaumont again. She had given them quite a chase before and in the ensuing years had been just a tad bit too elusive for their liking. She was in for it now.

She could feel their excitement. She pulled out the prepared statement Paula had crafted yesterday, the one that she had failed to commit to memory, and began in a monotone to read from it.

A collective sigh.

She ignored it and proceeded.

Okay, okay, they grumbled. They already knew this stuff or why else would they be here? What they really wanted was to gawk at and interrogate the new flamboyant joint president of Soloman-Schmitt, not listen to her read.

“Ms. Beaumont! Ms. Beaumont!”

A sea of raised arms.

Did it, Ms. Beaumont wondered, actually say anywhere that she had to respond to questions? She searched Paula’s notes. Nope, it didn’t say anything at all about question and answer time.

“Ms. Beaumont! Ms. Beaumont!”

She put her notes away and stared longingly over their heads at the boulevard.

“Over here, Ms. Beaumont! Over here! That’s it, that’s it! Yes!”

“Ms. Beaumont! How’s married life treating you? How’s your beautiful wife?”

She nodded with a smile and gave a thumbs-up sign, glancing over her shoulder at her handler. He raised his eyebrow and shook his head. He too had heard Goodman’s arguments against her appointment. This scene and the endless potential for it was one of them.

“C’mon. Ms. Beaumont. Give us a break. Make some kind of statement.”

She shook her head no.

“Was it worth it?”

She shook her head yes. Two thumbs-up this time. She knew there was something she should be doing to regain control of the situation, but she hadn’t a clue what that might be.

“Ms. Beaumont. Ms. Beaumont!”

Cameras. Flashes. Catcalls. This was not cool. She cast a furtive glance to her handler again. He shrugged.

Goodman was right, Lydia thought. The press didn’t give a shit that she was the joint president of Soloman-Schmitt and they never would. She brushed her hair from her eyes and felt in her pocket for her sunglasses. She had forgotten the sunglasses. She could hear the banner flapping behind her, the click of cameras, the murmur of the press as they speculated amongst themselves; about her, about Helaine, about everything but the business at hand. Del would probably think this was funny. Perhaps it was. She would, however, have a word or two with Paula about it afterward. This couldn’t happen to her again.

“Ms. Beaumont! Cat got your tongue?”

She who hesitates is lost.

“Not still mad at us, are you?”

The traffic on the boulevard ebbed and flowed, ebbed and flowed again, like a pulse.

Uh…no. Not mad. Mad isn’t the appropriate word. She tapped the mike again, this time hard enough that the reporters closest to her were forced to cover their ears. Everyone else quieted down. “If you’d like to write your questions on little pieces of paper,” she began, “and pass them to the front–”

Jeering was what she would get for goading them.

“Ms. Beaumont! Ms. Beau–”

Another whack at the mike. Lydia held up her hand to continue, “and we’ll answer as many of them as time will allow.”

More jeering.

She was, she saw, only making matters worse. She looked to her assistant beseechingly, ready to walk off.

He was on his cell phone. He gave her another shrug.

“C’mon! How’s your love life, Ms. Beaumont?”

A roar of approval.

“Ms. Beaumont!”

All was lost. She turned again to convey this opinion to her useless handler. This time he was motioning with his hands for her to abandon the podium. It seemed like an excellent idea.

“Ms. Beaumont!” a reporter yelled above the crowd, “
President
Beaumont!”

With that, unfortunately, the reporter had her attention.

“We want to know–how’s your sex life?”

She gave the reporter a deadly stare.

He repeated the question.

She glared into his camera.

“Fabulous,” he said. “Thank you, love.”

“Come on, Ms. Beaumont, come on,” Mr. Useless pleaded.

Her sex life. What a stupid bastard. “My sex life,” she said, turning toward him and no longer mindful of the mike. “My sex life,” she repeated. “What a stupid bast–can you believe this crap?” she asked.

“Ooh, ooh, ooh,” the man stammered, hurriedly shoving his cell phone into his pants pocket and holding his finger up to his lips.

She paid him no heed. “What a bunch of horny assholes.”

“Ooh, ooh, ooh,” he said again, virtually plucking her from the podium. “Go,” he urged, pushing her from behind. “Go!”

She glanced over her shoulder and froze. Absolute mayhem had erupted. An uproar.

“Please, Ms. Beaumont, don’t speak,” he begged. The press was in hot pursuit. “Just go, go, GO!”

_____

“What the hell was that?” Paula demanded.

“Where the hell were you?”

“Beaumont, that is worse than I could ever have imagined. That is beyond charisma. That is–”

“I’m not trying to be charismatic, Paula. I’m just–”

“Try not to be charismatic! Try
not
to be. Why are you doing this to me? How could you?”

Lydia fell into the nearby chair. “I…I forgot the mike was on.”

“Forgot! The mike is always on. Always, Beaumont. How could you not know that? Even if you don’t see a mike, there is a mike, and it is always, always, always on!”

_____

“Darling, do you want to talk abou–?”

“NO.”

Okay. She could understand that. Helaine stroked Lydia’s hair. “But thanks for the thumbs-up,” she whispered.

“Mmmm…you’re welcome.”

Lydia wasn’t very good company tonight. Sullen and swimming in self-loathing. And if that wasn’t bad enough, tomorrow was her birthday.

“Darling, is there anything I can do?”

“I forgot the mike was on.”

Helaine smiled. Such a funny gaffe. “Well,” she said, with a gentle sigh that she hoped would not betray amusement, “the mike is always on.”

_____

“Hey, sport.”

“Del, let me just interrupt your mirth long enough to say that I don’t want to discuss it.”

“Discuss what?”

“Don’t make me laugh. Paula is livid.”

“And you can see that that’s funny, I hope?”

“I forgot the damn mike was still on, believe it or not.”

“Well, Liddy, the mike is always on.”

_____

“This is not a focus group! It’s not a goddamned coffee klatch! And we are not running a beauty pageant here! That woman is nothing but a–a hedonist!”

Lydia Beaumont a hedonist? Sounded rather specious to the board. Stocks were trading high today, so who cares anyway?

“Mr. Goodman–”

“I have the floor and I’m not yielding it!”

The emergency board meeting was called by Mr. Goodman, himself. No emergency was registering, though. Stocks were trading high today thanks to Soloman-Schmitt’s newly appointed “corporate heart-throb”, as most of the dailies had put it this morning.

Noontime. Stocks high and only half the board showed up. Goodman was furious, indifferent to the two point surge or Joint President Beaumont’s soaring approval rating. “She flies in the face of everything Soloman-Schmitt represents. Our tradition, our very ethos has been violated here.”

No, Treadwell had been right all along. Beaumont did not fly in the face of corporate tradition; Beaumont was the new face of the corporation. Hedonist or not, she was to be Soloman-Schmitt’s makeover, a face
lift
, if you will, to bring the doddering old company into the twenty-first century with a much more youthful glow. No new logo could accomplish that, Paula had successfully argued. No new moniker, no merger or acquisition, just one modern face. That of the alluring and rather enigmatic Lydia Beaumont.

They would let Treadwell know she was a genius. Day one and Beaumont was already working like a charm.

Goodman was sputtering with rage. Members shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. The man was wrong. A dinosaur. A fossil. A relic.

“Silas–”

“I will not yield!”

_____

Damage control. Paula had been tipped off about the emergency meeting and she was glad that Beaumont was out for the day. Having forgotten that it was the woman’s birthday, she suspected instead that the joint president was apprised of these developments and was somewhere doing what she did best. Hiding. Or just plain being obtuse.

So Paula had devoted all morning to hand-holding the board, guaranteeing them that which she was no longer certain could be guaranteed. By quarter to twelve it had finally paid off and she announced to her assistant with a somewhat shaky grin that four of the board members had agreed to be no-shows. Her calls to Goodman’s home office, however, were not returned, and although shares of Soloman-Schmitt were outperforming in the first part of the day, causing the whole market to rally, she just knew it wouldn’t be enough to get him to back down.

The board convened at noon, stocks soaring. Paula had a martini and fingernail lunch complete with stale peanuts and then, with word from an anonymous source that Goodman had failed in his efforts to remove Beaumont, she threw up her arms, and spent the remainder of the day watching the company’s shares climb up into the stratosphere, holding her breath, lungs filled with all that dangerously thin air, and waiting, almost faint from the lack of oxygen, until the close of the bell before acknowledging that she could, at last, actually declare victory.

After that, feeling unusually depleted, she went home to her husband, to gloat in private over a triumph that she had, in the eleventh hour, not really expected.

Fortune

The birthday girl’s day was, as she had planned, far less eventful than Silas Goodman’s or Paula Treadwell’s, though all of their fortunes were plainly crossed and she was working overtime in her mind not to know it. She had started, the night before, doing her hiding act and being hard to get and to those talents she threw in sulking, which she could also excel at and which she did all the way to bed.

Once in bed, however, her other skills went unexploited as Helaine insisted they forego a long night in order to maximize the surprise that lay ahead for the following evening. This did not go over well with Lydia and she slept fitfully, her psyche a victim of the hormonal tyranny she constantly feared would one day come to rule and ruin her. At about three in the morning, having woken from a nightmare (she was being chased by naked reporters), she roused Helaine for the purposes of simply “making out.”

This the good doctor finally consented to, extracting first a promise from Lydia that it would not go any farther than that.

“You have my word.”

They made out and petted until the sun came up and until their lips were bruised and swollen from kissing.

Early appointments for Dr. Kristenson. She winced at the daylight and reluctantly extricated herself from the love-lock, leaving the bed to the sound of Lydia’s bitter protests and emerging from the bedroom exhausted and horny. Dressed, but not at all prepared for her nine o’clock.

Coffee-maker on. She opened the front door looking for the morning paper and found her mate’s bewildered face looking up at her, from above the fold. That’s right, she muttered to herself, remembering afresh the corporate controversy that was landing Lydia once again on the front pages of the dailies, exactly were she hated to be. Well, it’s her birthday for goodness’ sake. Helaine stashed it in the coat closet and went back empty handed to the kitchen, giving a start this time to finding Lydia standing there, nude and not nearly as bewildered, holding out two fresh cups of coffee.