Russell Wiley Is Out to Lunch (17 page)

Waiting for the light on the corner of Ninth Street, I study the profile of her face, trying to detect evidence of those gradual changes that are impossible to spot while they’re actually happening.

“All couples fight about sex and money,” she says at last.

“How do you know?”

“My friends tell me. I read magazines.”

“So you tell your friends we fight about sex and money?”

“Only the sex. The money stuff bores them.”

“It must be a brief conversation then.”

“Ha ha. Tell me about it.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

We’re quiet again. I sense the box she’s carrying is getting heavy in her arms, but she doesn’t ask me to help and I don’t offer.

Sam and I met in a pub in London called the Goose and Gherkin. It was two years after my dad died. I’d convinced my mom to fund a semester abroad. I told her all kinds of academic and cultural reasons why it made sense. But really I was on a mission to meet English girls. I was immediately drawn to Sam—her style, her bravado, and of course, her accent.

Her dark brown hair was short and spiky.

She wore a faded “The Queen Is Dead” T-shirt, camouflage pants and black Doc Martens.

The pub was loud, and a lot of people were jabbering. But I could feel we had an instant connection.

“That’s mega,” she said when I told her it was my first night in town, that it had taken me most of the previous day and night to fly from Columbus, Ohio, via Chicago to get here.

“Cheers,” she said when I bought her a drink.

“A small pickled cucumber,” she said when I asked her what a gherkin was anyway.

“Brilliant,” she said when I told her the group I’d come with were heading to a nightclub in Camden Town. When we left the club at three in the morning, we kissed and parted in separate cabs. Back at my dorm, alcohol and jet lag kicked in. I slept for ten hours. When I woke, I called the number Sam had given me. She answered on the second ring, inviting me to join her for a “fry up” at her favorite café and for a tour of Portobello Road Market.

“Trust me,” she said, ordering us each a plateful of fried eggs, fried sausages, fried bacon, fried tomatoes and fried bread. “This is how we do it here.”

“I think I’m going to barf.”

“You’ll be fine. Just bite, chew, swallow, and wash it down with a mouthful of tea.”

We walked from stall to stall as the grease congealed in my stomach. Sam was trying on a secondhand coat, a nubby, red woolen item that hung shapelessly on her, when I asked her what part of England she was from.

She spun around like a red cone. “I ain’t from England, mate,” she said in her best Cockney accent. “I grew up in Massachusetts. So, what do you think? Is this worth seventy-five quid?”

I converted the amount to dollars and said, “You could get a new one for that.”

She bought it anyway, haggling with the girl who was working at the stall until she got her down to sixty pounds.

“It would have been a bargain at half the price,” she said as we walked away.

She hadn’t meant to fool me with the accent, she said. She couldn’t help it. It was medically proven that some people pick up accents quickly. In reality she was an American student like me, in London for the full year. She’d arrived a semester earlier and was sharing a third-floor flat in a house in Bayswater with two fellow students, Shelley and Jennifer. When we stopped by to drop off her new purchase, I was expecting to meet them. But even though the devastating chaos of their existence was immediately visible, the place was quiet.

“Well, my good chap,” she said, leaning against the just-closed front door. “It just so happens they’re in Paris till Monday. So we have the run of the entire estate.”

Sam dropped the blue-and-white striped plastic bag containing her new red coat on the floor. Then she hung my jacket on a crowded coatrack and wrapped her tan raincoat around it.

She walked through the living room, picked up a discarded bra from the back of an armchair, and tossed it onto a hill of clothes inside one of the bedrooms. She closed that door and headed into the kitchen.

“In England, you will quickly discover one thing,” she said, turning on the cold tap and letting it run for a few seconds. “It’s that no important decisions should ever be made without first putting the kettle on.”

She filled the kettle, took a match from a large box with a picture of a ship on it, and lit one of the gas rings on her stove. As the water was heating, she opened a cupboard and placed two mugs on the counter. One of them had a picture of a red London bus on the side. She pulled two spoons from a drawer and let them clatter inside the mugs. She was wearing a man’s white shirt, a pleated gray skirt, white ankle socks and chunky black shoes—a slightly ridiculous, quasi-schoolgirl look that somehow seemed the height of fashion among the crowds around Portobello Road.

She opened the fridge, studied the contents, then closed it again without taking anything out.

“Well, there’s no milk, but you still have one choice you need to make.” She shuffled among the tins and cartons on the counter. She turned to me, gesturing first with a jar of Nescafé in one hand and then with a box of Typhoo tea bags in the other. “Coffee, tea…or me?”

I pretended to act cool, as if seriously considering the different options. Sam’s sleeves were rolled halfway up her forearms. The spiky hair from the previous night had been reconfigured into two ponytails, held together with rubber bands that stuck out from the side of her head. She was wearing black eyeliner and a dark red lipstick. It was the sexiest look I had ever seen.

I turned off the gas and lifted her onto the kitchen counter, kissing her hard as she wrapped her legs around me.

“Do you want me to take that?” I ask her now as we turn onto Eighth Avenue, still six blocks from home.

“I thought you said it was garbage.”

“I said it was junk,” I tell her. “But I meant it in the nicest possible way.”

She hands me the wooden box.

“Did I tell you Greg’s coming to town next week?” she says a minute later.

“Greg?”

“Greg Witchel. You’ve seen his picture.”

I’ve seen several. Greg was Sam’s boyfriend for two years in high school. Her first big love. His image appears in many of the family photos displayed on the walls of Sam’s parents’ house. A shaggy mop of blond hair, a goofy grin and a body built for the MTV beach house.

“He’s coming for some big direct marketing conference,” she says. “His company’s paying for two nights in a hotel.”

“That’s nice.”

“After that, I told him he could crash with us for a night.”

“Oh, really.”

“You have a problem with that?”

“Me?”

“Don’t give me that look,” she says. “He wanted to get together. What’s your problem? He wants to meet you. I haven’t seen him for twenty years.”

“No problem,” I say. “I always love to meet your friends.”

On Friday morning, I decide it’s important for me to make up the weekly staff meeting I canceled when Ben got fired on Wednesday.

I normally have the meeting at eleven thirty on Wednesdays. Eleven thirty’s a good time for it. It motivates everyone to get through the topics we’re discussing within an hour. That way we can all take a full ninety minutes for lunch. And Wednesday’s usually a good day for it. It avoids conflicts with other weekly meetings. Plus, because it’s in the middle of the week, it gives us time to correct the mistakes of the first half of the week and get things back on track by Friday. This timing doesn’t allow us to correct the mistakes of the second half of the previous week. But those mistakes have often been forgotten or superseded by others long before the next Wednesday meeting rolls around.

If ever I cancel the meeting, I usually let things slide till the following Wednesday. But this hasn’t been a normal week. My team needs to see me steering our departmental ship with confidence. Rumors are flying. They need me to confirm that management knows what it’s doing and has a clear vision for the future. They need me to reassure them that their work is valued and their livelihoods are secure.

I can’t do any of that. But the meeting may help me crystallize my thinking on how my team might function with two less people—and which two names I will give to HR next month so that severance packages can be prepared.

The first step will be to decide whom I
need
to keep. And then whom I
want
to keep. I will put on paper my optimal mix of people—a mix that will ensure I have a fully functioning, appropriately motivated team. After that, I will adjust as necessary for factors beyond my control, like Henry’s misplaced love for Cindy.

Being on time for the meeting, I’m the first one seated in the small conference room. The rest of my team shuffles in over the next few minutes.

Barbara Ward is the first to arrive. Which makes sense. As the departmental assistant, she’s the least busy. In theory, Barbara’s job is to help ensure that my whole department runs smoothly. In reality, she is one of those old-timers at the company for whom any job description became superfluous many years ago. But I turn a blind eye to her photo-sharing and eBay addictions because Barbara does have one talent that makes her indispensable. Her capacity for endurance gossiping is unparalleled. She spends hours each week plugged in to a network of executive assistants throughout the company, which means she is always first with the scoop on upcoming hirings, firings, staff promotions and product launches.

“What’s new?” I ask as she takes her seat two places down the table. And then, in case she feels the need to update me on her grandchildren’s lives, I specify: “I hear they’re staffing up in Yolanda Pew’s division.”

“How do you know?” she says. “It’s all meant to be top secret.” I suspect Barbara has a paranoid streak, that she thinks her internal calls are being recorded.

“I’ve talked to Barney Barnes,” I say. She doesn’t need to know that the last time I talked to him was a year ago at the cafeteria salad bar.

Barbara leans toward me and says in a loud whisper, “Can you believe it? Everyone else is getting laid off, and he’s hiring eight new people. He’s even talking to Martin.”

Like I said, Barbara is indispensable.

The door opens and Angela Campos walks in with the notebook and pen she likes to carry. Today, Angela is in a tightly buttoned blouse with a cutout pattern down each arm. She walks around to sit opposite Barbara. Even though she’s two seats down from me, she’s close enough that I smell the flowers of her perfume.

“Hi, Mr. Wiley,” she says.

Barbara makes a huffing sound.

“Russell,” I say and clear my throat. We sit in silence for a while. I notice that Angela has drawn a series of interconnected swirls on the inside cover of her notebook.

Erika Fallon and Sally Yun arrive together. This is their first meeting as part of my team. They sit together at the far end of the table.

We all sit in silence for a while as I practice looking at Erika with the same expression of professional detachment I use on the rest of my team.

Kelly Gardner and Jeremy Stent, our two marketing coordinators, arrive. They’re deep into a discussion of the cookies now being served in the staff cafeteria, where a new food service company has just taken over the contract.

Pete Hughes follows. He’s one of the four managers who report to me. Pete’s a short guy, mostly bald, who moves with his head down. He used to wrestle in college, but that was twenty years ago. He looks up briefly to check who’s here, then sits in a chair close to the door. As usual, his top button is undone and his tie is loose at his collar. His sleeves are rolled up to reveal hairy arms. When forced to sit down at any kind of internal meeting, Pete can never shake the air of impatience that hangs over him. I sympathize. I know what it feels like to have a ton of work piled up on your desk, all with pressing deadlines, only to have to sit through another bullshit session that doesn’t accomplish anything or help anyone move projects forward. But while I sympathize with Pete, he’s starting to bug me too. As he waits for the meeting to begin, he makes conspicuous notes on his pad to remind us he has a lot on his mind and many better things to do.

I let the inconsequential chatter continue. I know it’s important for a certain personality type to connect with people they work with on a more personal level. The discussion broadens from the specific (cookies) to the general (desserts). It’s interesting to watch Kelly get passionate about carrot cake. She thinks it’s “way too sweet” and “virtually inedible.” Kelly is one of the invisible people, a quiet and hardworking employee who’s too busy and too shy to worry about her profile with management.

Kelly’s the first person Henry would want me to fire. He doesn’t like the way she looks. He barely acknowledges her existence. He has no idea how much work she actually does.

The conversation ceases when Roger Jones arrives. It’s an awkward silence. A line I once saw on a refrigerator magnet pops into my head: stressed is the opposite of desserts.

I start thinking about how I’m actually going to run my department with Roger out for six weeks and two others permanently gone. It won’t be easy. My company is neither ruthless nor effective when it comes to firing people. We’re not like those organizations that execute a rigid performance management plan—and eliminate the bottom ten percent of their workforce every year to make room for new hires. In those companies, everything’s out in the open. People know if they are not measuring up. When the ax falls, the nonperformers get cut. There are really no surprises.

Burke-Hart is not like that. We like to promote collegiality. Our performance management system is directional, based on the personal, nonscientific observations of departmental managers. There’s no penalty for poor performance built into our grading system. We don’t have the annual cull of the lame, the weak and the unproductive. When business gets bad and layoffs come, we start to panic. We reduce headcount randomly. We’re just as likely to eliminate star performers or reliable workers as we are to chop away the real dead wood.