“I don’t think I need it,” he said matter-of-factly. “When I took over as head of worldwide media last year, this company’s stock was in the toilet. Now we’ve got three CDs in Billboard’s Top Ten, four of the top-rated shows on the networks, and the top-grossing game system in the country for the last three weeks running. Nothing wrong with the way I’m doing my job.”
“So why do you think the board hired me to work with you?”
He finally took his eyes off the monitor, to give her the
“I guess somebody thinks I need a little ‘seasoning.’” He made little quotation marks with his fingers. “They want me to work on my ‘sandbox skills.’ Apparently, Scottso might have hurt somebody’s little feelings when he took over. Like that has any relevance.”
“And you don’t think it does?”
“Revenues have been up every quarter since I came in. All these Ivy League bitches with their Harvard MBAs and their Yale degrees wouldn’t know a hit if it came up and bit them in the ass. Things needed to be shaken up. A couple of dishes got chipped along the way? So fucking what? I never knew this industry had so many pussies.”
She tried to cross her legs, knowing that she was being tested here. Pussies. Bitches The language of intimidation. If you protested, you were barred from the boys’ locker room. But if you put up with too much, you were a doormat for life.
“So you’re the only one with balls around here, I guess,” she said flatly, letting him know she could play if she really had to.
He snorted in contempt. “You’re the only one with balls,” he mimicked her. “Listen to you. Like you’re going to tell me about my business? And where’d you go to college, Princeton?”
“I did my graduate work in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan.” She started to stick her chin out and then caught herself. “Why is that important to you?”
“Organizational psychology.” He looked like he’d just licked a cat. “That’s like a tofu hamburger, isn’t it? What are you? You’re not in business and you’re not a real shrink. Who do you think you’re kidding?”
She felt the little form squirming and kicking inside her, not wanting to let on that she’d asked herself the same question at least once a week for the last twelve years. She wondered if he somehow knew this was the biggest account she’d ever landed. Twelve years of patiently handing out business cards, trying to spread her name around, billing for less than she was worth, trying to build on each of her little success stories. Twelve years of holding hands with brusque, socially underdeveloped executives who needed a coach to keep them from alienating colleagues and damaging their companies.
“Well, my understanding is that I have a mandate to work with you on your management skills,” she said, trying to sound firm. “And I usually don’t get called in if everything is hunky-dory.”
He fidgeted a little, his left loafer waggling on the edge of the desk.
“But how the hell can you understand my position? Have you ever even run a business?” He paused for effect, hoping to humiliate her. “I’ve got fifteen hundred people answering to me worldwide and I bet you can’t even balance your checkbook. And now you’re going to walk in here and tell me something I don’t already know?”
She had the sensation of finding herself pressed up against a cold wall. If she let him push her around now, she’d never gain his respect. Her eyes moved across the office, searching for something that would put them on more even footing. When everything else failed nowadays, she could usually make her pregnancy into a conversation piece, sometimes even a bond she could share with other women and family-minded men. But there were no photos of children here. Just shots of several different silicon-enhanced stripper-types accompanying him on Cancún vacations, fishing expeditions in the Florida Keys, and autographed photos taken with members of Bon Jovi and various sports luminaries she didn’t quite recognize.
Instead, with mounting unease, she found her gaze drawn to a life-sized cut-out in the corner, the figure of a barrel-chested man in a tuxedo with a picture of her client’s face imposed on the top.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Whadayya mean, what’s that? It’s the Don.”
“The Don?”
“Whaddaya, kidding? The Don. The Don!” He looked incredulous. “Don Corleone. From... The... Godfather Maybe you’ve heard of it...?”
He smiled as if he was addressing a child with special needs, and she nodded, mildly embarrassed, not daring to let on that somehow she had reached the ripe age of thirty-eight without ever seeing that particular film.
Oh, of course she’d heard of it. She even vaguely remembered her older sister and her middle school friends whispering and giggling about some tawdry bit of business on page twenty-seven of the novel it was based on. But the truth was, the story had never interested her enough to actually sit down and watch it, even though most of the men she worked with referred to it as some kind of sacred inviolate Ur text. All those dark muttering codes and oaths of masculinity, all those silly posturing threats from a bunch of frat boys. She could never take it seriously, even when her husband begged her to watch it with him.
“Ohhhh, so you’re the Don,” she said.
He looked pleased, perhaps hearing an undertone of admiration that she had not really intended.
“What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?” he mumbled. “Had you come to me in friendship, then this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day.”
She froze in alarm, until she realized he must have been reciting lines from the film.
“You sound just like him,” she said.
Who was in this movie anyway? Marlon Brando? Al Pacino? She was more partial to films about women triumphing over adversity. A League of Their Own Pretty Woman.
“I better.” He laced his hands behind his head. “I must’ve watched it two, three hundred times with my old man.”
“Really?” She pretended to be impressed.
“Well, whaddaya want? You grow up in Bensonhurst, it’s like learning the Pledge of Allegiance.”
“Sure. A rite of passage.”
She watched the way his body language changed as he began to talk about it. How his feet finally came off the desk and he sat forward in his seat a little, looking her in the eye for the first time.
“You ever wonder...?”
He’d started to ask an earnest question but stopped himself, not sure if he was quite ready to show her any kind of deference yet.
“What?”
She saw him wrestle with an idea, his eyes narrowing as he tried to pin it down, a flush of boyish pinkness rising in his cheeks.
“Did you ever really wonder why Kay left Michael?” he asked.
She steepled her fingers, as if it was a question that had long troubled her as well.
“Well, why do you think Kay left Michael?”
She watched him for cues, seeing that she’d set off a circuit of associations. He looked down at a shrink-wrapped CD that had been lying on his desk and scratched at the edge of the cellophane with his fingernail.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning pensive. “She acts like she’s shocked when she finds out what he does for a living, but c’mon — like she didn’t know already from being at the wedding and seeing his father? What business did she think they were in, State Farm home insurance?”