Fiction Friday

This is another excerpt from The Role Model. Oh, it almost makes me miss my job! ;)

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Pissed at having to burn valuable phone time attending another sales meeting - and prompted three times by the god-awful blinking reminder on his desktop - Ted and his monthly inflow figures huffed toward the glass-walled conference room at exactly 11:01.

But the meeting wasn’t even close to starting. The lights were on, the projector wasn’t hooked up yet, the inevitable PowerPoint presentation wasn’t vacillating against the screen. The jowly bulk of Garrett Ames, Senior VP of Sales, leered into the guts of a laptop being disemboweled by Lucy, the company’s one-woman IT department. Yeah, he was really looking at the motherboard, the dirty old fuck. His gin-blossom nose was virtually buried in her cleavage.

Ames stabbed a bloated pink paw holding a pencil toward the open circuitry. “So what’s that thingamabob do?”

“It’s the disk drive.” Lucy shielded it with her hand. “Please be careful with that.”

He was undaunted. “And that’s where you’re supposed put the CDs?”

She gave Ames a withering glance over the tops of the tiny black-framed glasses that every female under thirty seemed to be wearing those days. She’d told Ted that Ames had broken three laptops in the last year. “Theoretically.”

Ted caught Lucy’s eye and smiled. She smiled back, ungluing something in his knees. She was like Kryptonite to him: a lethal polyglot of brains and beauty, thick black hair and long legs and clear olive-green eyes that looked straight through him to all the bullshit he tried to hide from the world.

What the hell are you doing, he warned himself, shoving a hand through a hairline that used to be lower. It was a good thing that the Charleston job was about to come through. Before what was still an innocent flirtation could go any further.

She had to know he was married. He kept a picture of Diana on his desk, for Christ’s sake. But maybe Lucy was one of those girls who didn’t care. He’d met a few. One of those young, opportunistic girls, who assumed legal age during Clinton’s definition of “is,” devoid of guilt, who figured that if you were cheating on your wife, it was your problem, not theirs, but only if someone found out.

“Amazing things. Amazing things,” Ames muttered toward Lucy’s breasts. Then somehow caught that Ted was standing in the doorway. He didn’t even have the grace to look ashamed. “Oh, hey, Teddy. I just can’t get over how they get all that stuff into a box that small.”

In Ted’s peripheral vision he could see Lucy rolling her eyes. One of their discussions, over their series of innocent coffees and innocent lunches, was about how different generations have accepted the computerized workplace. Ted, not weaned on a mouse like Lucy, had learned all his technology on the fly. Lucy had admired that about him, what she called his “mental flexibility.” (Diana had likened it more to “the attention span of a coke-snorting gnat.”) He preferred to think of his thirst for novelty as self-inoculation against the kind of staidness so many of his contemporaries had settled into as they aged. God forbid he wound up like Garrett Ames, a sixty-something dinosaur. Either Ames’s synapses were ossified by too many three-martini lunches to absorb new information, or he simply didn’t care. The guy was still probably amazed by the invention of the telephone. And by the idea of having attractive young women in his own workplace to do his bidding, far from his wife’s scolding eyes.

Dirty old fuck.

But the dirty old fuck was still Ted’s boss. And the only thing standing between him and the Southeast Regional VP job that had been vacant for the last six weeks. Ted had made his case. Paraded out his numbers for the last fiscal year. Enumerated the deals he’d closed, his meteoric rise and stellar accomplishments since joining the company three years ago. He’d taken all the right parties out to lunch and talked about his eagerness to pursue new challenges. Never lost an opportunity to display his willingness to make the move to Charleston that the job required. Hell, he’d done everything short of grabbing Ames by his flabby jowls and singing “I wish I was in Dixie.”

But it was getting harder to play the waiting game. He’d paid his dues. He was forty-five years old. A youthful forty-five, he liked to think. Not too much gray or too many lines in his face, not yet. Good genes - from his mother’s side, at least - would only get you so far. It was time he either got the spoils, or moved on.

“Yeah,” Ted said. “Amazing. Look, Garrett, do I have time for a couple of calls? If I don’t catch Zurich now, I’m going to lose them until tomorrow. Time is money, you know.”

That was a technology that Ames could understand.

Still gaping into the maw of the laptop - or perhaps down Lucy’s blouse - Ames waves Ted off. But not before Ted could casually set his notepad computer and file folders at the “power position” at the conference table. Directly across from where the president usually sits. Not at his right hand. That was for squids, subordinate suits who will never rise higher than Regional VP. Eye contact, baby, that’s what worked. Hell, if he had to be mired in some time-suck of a meeting, he might as well make political hay out of it.

If Ames was too addled to get the message, perhaps it was time to go over his head.