by Jason Letts
I pulled a pen out of my bag and held it above the page, still unsure of what I was going to do. I couldn’t deny that I was attracted to the one man in this office who hadn’t been hounding me for sex, and now I had the chance to hear how he felt about something. In the end I knew I couldn’t live with myself without finding out what it was. I gave my consent.
Now all I hoped was that it was something good.
CHAPTER 4
When I was around ten years old, I used to spend a lot of time flopped on a ragged Lay-Z-Boy recliner while my sister and her friend watched DVD’s and tapes of 90’s TV shows. I remember one time we were all watching an episode of Dawson’s Creek in which Joey and Jen were talking about Dawson and asking each other if they thought he had a shotgun or a pistol.
With zero comprehension of the innuendo, I blurted out “I hope he has a shotgun!”
Lindsay and her friend died laughing.
I’d gotten so carried away thinking about what Keenan was going to say to me now that I’d signed his letter, I was all the way to hoping he had a shotgun.
I had to swallow my pride a little to return to Mouse Roar on Monday, which was the second of the new year. Getting a surprised look from Martin at the front door as I approached the entrance was bad enough, but having to wait for the elevator with Chelsea turned out to be excruciating.
“I guess everything worked out then,” she said in a falsely sweet tone. “Which one was it, Martin, little Hendrick? Did you have to teach him where your vagina was and not to pinch too hard on your nipples?”
Who needed coffee to wake up with comments like that being tossed around?
“I haven’t slept with anyone, nor am I planning to. And I’m not seeing or talking to any of them either. One other thing. How about between the two of us we have a rule where whenever one of us is inclined to say anything about anyone’s vagina, we just don’t.”
She laughed in a way that suggested she thought I was playing along with her.
“Oh, Sarah,” she said, my name making me give her another askew glance. “Maybe working alongside you won’t be so bad. But I have a hunch before long you’ll be so desperate to talk that you’ll be open to a lot more topics of discussion than you are now.”
I made a mental note to avoid another elevator ride with Chelsea by any means necessary.
Once upstairs, I settled into my chair and logged onto my computer. Martin was in his office seemingly without any intention of chatting me up all morning, which was a big plus. Keenan was nowhere to be found and my mailbox had been empty of any more communication. I did see, however, that his box was empty as well. If nothing else, he knew I was receptive to being spoken to.
But Martin only needed about ten minutes before he came over to see me. He had a curious look on his face and a pack of Q-tips in his hand. It seemed like he expected me to speak first, but I didn’t.
“I was under the impression you weren’t going to be coming in anymore,” he said.
I’d been so consumed by thinking about what Keenan might say and how I would react that I hadn’t spared a thought for what I would say in this completely obvious conversation. I had to think fast. At least I’d done myself up a little more than usual with my hair in a knot and a nicer dress and leggings, which all together occupied Martin’s attention.
“I decided I wanted to give it another shot. I would like to be more personable as long as everyone keeps any private business to themselves,” I said, and he raised an eyebrow. I wondered if he knew about Keenan’s letter and my acceptance. His suspicious look had an air of disappointment to it.
“That’s great to hear,” he said flatly. “We do need to switch gears with you a smidge though, right? I think you’ve gotten through most of the descriptions and campaigns we need at the moment. If you wouldn’t mind giving us a hand with something else, that’d be great.”
“OK,” I said.
“Follow me.”
Martin turned his back and I got up to tail him all the way to the far end of the floor, where he brought me into a room lined with computer equipment. There were probably a thousand little blinking lights from all of the running machines.
“Another quirk about Mr. Roche is that he’s very wary of relying on other people’s systems. He’s insisted from the beginning that everything we do be stored and hosted in-house. He also has high standards for quality and plans far out in the future. That’s why we have a server room that could accommodate the computing needs of a small country.”
“It’s impressive,” I said before digging for another comment so as to seem more talkative. “I wonder how it all works.”
Martin smiled weakly and nodded.
“It would take years of study to get up to speed on that, and unfortunately you won’t be able to get started on that today at least. We have been having a bit of a problem in here with the dust. Grit builds up and slows everything down. We need you to clean every inch of every wire, every connection, every surface.”
I swallowed. There were miles of wires jammed into this room.
“All right,” I said faintly.
“If you’d prefer not to, you can always…”
“I said all right.”
“Take this,” he said, referring to the box. “I want you to give it back to me at the end of the day with every single cotton swab as black as coal inside. Those rubber gloves hanging on the wall aren’t a bad idea either. Take that screwdriver as well.”
The way he shoved the plastic box into my middle was not gentle. Then he left me there to clean out the servers, which obviously had never been done before. Wherever they came from before they were brought here, they hadn’t been cleaned there either.
Finding where to start was a challenge, and then once I did the job was every bit as tedious as it seemed. Some people enjoyed cleaning, but I wasn’t one of those people. I looked up the first few times footsteps went by, hoping and yet dreading for Keenan to find me here and deliver his statement, but after it wasn’t ever him I chose to ignore passersby than make eye contact with them while sitting on the floor wearing rubber gloves and swabbing cords.
My work dresses were of a style I considered conservative yet attractive, or “sexy librarian” would be another way to say it, but after an hour the forest-green one had absorbed enough soot that it started to take on the tone of a haunted wood. I couldn’t even imagine what was happening to my face and hair; I promised myself I wouldn’t look in a mirror until I had drowned myself in the shower back home.
As the afternoon stretched on and I made achingly slow progress around the server room, I was sure Keenan would come and put me out of my misery. But five o’clock hit without a whiff of him, and I dropped off the blackened swabs on Martin’s desk as requested. His smile indicated that he was having too much fun making the girl who turned him down perform hours of manual labor.
The next day was no better. Once the server room was done, Martin put me up to more straightforward cleaning of the windows and floors, resulting in yet another pretty dress being nearly ruined because I was foolish enough to think Martin wouldn’t have converted my duties to this type of thing permanently. This job also had the added bonus of making me visible to the entire staff at all times. I couldn’t tell who it was, but one of the guys made a joke that I should’ve known one of the types of content I’d be expected to manage in my position was the dirt on the windows.
There was the temptation to wear jeans and old t-shirts to better suit my new occupation, but I was sure Keenan wouldn’t make me wait another day to deliver his news. Unfortunately I once again badly paid the price for dressing up. The temperature out was “To Build a Fire” freezing and a snowstorm was rolling in. Martin and the others came up with a dozen reasons for me to make walking trips to a post office blocks away that day. I had enough dirty, slushy snow caked to my legs that I could’ve passed for a yeti from the waist down.
I kept my composure through it all, but inside I was cracking. There were countles
s times where if I had seen Keenan I would’ve openly begged him to get it over with, that way I could finally walk out.
After the post office closed, I had to stand outside and wait for deliveries. When I was finally able to go, I had nightmares about what kind of work Martin would resort to throwing at me tomorrow. What was left other than spending the entire day performing back rubs and foot massages in the break room?
It turned out that they needed me to take a company car and pick up a client from JFK for a meeting.
“We usually call a car service, but since you’ve been so willing to pitch in…” Martin’s smug gloating was infuriating.
Traffic and the snowy roads made the trip twice as long as it should’ve been. The client’s plane was late. By the time we made it back to the office, I’d missed lunch. The client’s meeting meant that seeing Keenan at all that day was going to be an impossibility, but I did have space enough to sit at my desk because it tied up all of the high-level people. I spent the time looking at job openings.
I was printing out one listing for a tutoring position near the end of the day when I noticed I’d received a new email. I clicked over to see which of my esteemed colleagues had something new for me to do when I saw that it was from [email protected]. A second later and I was staring at the contents of the message. “Come to my office.”
My veins filled with lead and my heart had to beat twice as hard to pump any of it through. I tried to take a deep breath and calm down but didn’t succeed before I got up on my legs and walked to the office I’d been so longing to see. I kept my head down the entire way there, not wanting anyone to see what I was doing or know how I felt. The plain white door was in front of me. I knocked once, breathless to finally get an answer about what he wanted to say. The one thing I told myself I wouldn’t tell him was how making me wait had nearly driven me insane.
“Enter,” came a voice from within.
I turned the handle and stepped inside. Something about Keenan had always made me think this office would look like a bedroom bungalow with carpets and couches, but it really wasn’t too much unlike the rest of the office with its sparse, utilitarian decor. The only unusual decoration—and it was pretty darn unusual—was a guillotine in the corner that appeared to be rigged up to slice coconuts in half and spill the milk into little bottles positioned underneath. A basket of whole coconuts were on one side and a basket of split halves on the other.
It was surprising anything could distract me from the man I had come to see. My eyes returned to Keenan, who was sitting at his desk, leaning back with his hands in his pockets. He was pretty mellow about my entering, but he wasn’t ignoring me.
“You asked to see me,” I said, standing there in what must’ve been an awkward fashion. But my innate sense of insecurity seemed to fade away as his eyes connected with mine. It felt like I’d been plugged in. A charge overcame me, clearing my mind of the usual junk that streamed through there.
“Yeah, I just wanted to let you know that you seemed like a thoughtful person,” he said, nodding a little.
He wasn’t smiling, but his face was friendly enough. That was far from what mine must’ve been. It was galling to think I’d waited all this time and scrubbed so many floor tiles to hear I was thoughtful. It seemed like such a vacuous comment and I felt like I would’ve traded it in a heartbeat for anything else, no matter how objectifying whatever body part of mine he wanted to comment on was. I opened my mouth, ready to shout, Is that really all you wanted to say to me? But I caught myself just in time.
Something occurred to me in a snap that turned the entire situation around. This wasn’t about what he was going to say to me but rather what I was going to say to him that was important. I kept telling myself I was a smart, observant person, and I’d fallen into circumstances where I needed to show it. There was plenty I could’ve said, but I had to make sure it was what he was ready to hear.
“If that’s your way of asking me what I think, I’ll say that in just three weeks I’ve seen an incredible disconnect between the stated goals of this company and its practices. Martin said to me in my interview that you only wanted the absolute best here, but if I had to guess convenience and availability were the real driving factors. That’s why the way they behave can be at times so dangerously unprofessional.
“And that’s where you would come in, or you would if you really felt like this was your company. As much as you talk about needing them, the fact is you don’t particularly want them. That’s why you hardly ever spend time on the floor. It’s not being hands-off to allow them to take the initiative; it’s just plain a lack of passion on your part for the work that’s going on here. If I had to guess, you fully realize that your success has mostly been a matter of luck and happenstance that has taken place almost of its own accord. This isn’t what you dreamed of doing, is it?”
The way he looked at me as I spoke was curious. For once I felt like I was truly being listened to, that what I was saying might matter. And not just because of how he might judge me for it.
“I don’t think anybody grows up dreaming they’re going to start a digital marketing company,” Keenan admitted, shrugging. “But what do you suppose I really wanted to do, then?”
I looked at him, wishing I could find the answer written on his pretty face. This felt more like an interview than anything I’d ever had, but the questions weren’t straightforward and I’d had no ability to prepare for them. The stakes seemed higher. What did he have and what did that mean he wanted to do? A model, I joked to myself. No, it was something that might’ve been reflected in this very conversation.
“A psychologist, a counselor? But instead of helping people with their problems you found a path along figuring out how to make people buy things,” I said, hopeful.
“Close. I was an anthropology major back in college, where my focus was on modern cultures and the way they told themselves stories to gloss over problems and prejudices. In a way I thought I could expose consumerism, but instead I’ve turned into one of its leading proponents.”
I took a step closer to the desk, trying to figure out what this conversation meant and where this was all going. Talking about Keenan’s professional hopes and dreams had piqued my curiosity, but there was still a part of me that wanted the personal conversation I’d been promised.
“I get the impression that you’re not hearing the kinds of things I’m saying from anyone else. Is that true?”
At this he pursed his lips and swiveled in his chair to look away from me, making me scared I’d gone and thrown the entire thing away.
“There are bits of it I hear in my own thoughts, and then there’s a side of it I can get from my critics any time I want to tune in. That my work is shoddy and overrated, that I don’t have the right background to make Mouse Roar an enduring presence in this town, that it’s all going to come crashing down around me,” he said, only slightly higher than a whisper.
Keenan had said he wanted thoughtful, but I saw some vulnerability here that called for a little boldness and a fair shake of sympathy. I was glad he wasn’t the type of guy who pretended to be made out of iron all the time. Hearing his doubts and the unlikely way things unfolded for him put a lot behind that pretty face for me.
I took another step forward and let my fingertips rest on the edge of his desk.
“Even if it did, you’d still be a great success,” I said.
He turned his head back to me and what I hoped was my genuine, down-to-earth smile. We connected for a moment, but then he blinked, shutting me out.
“Thank you, Ms. Faverly. That’ll be all,” he said.
I paused, not wanting to leave, until I was finally able to force myself out.
As I left and went home, I spent the rest of the day feeling like an idiot. In my eyes I’d gotten him to open up only to come off like another goggling fangirl at the end. I’d been mentally chiding every other man here for their hasty advances, but I hadn’t made it through one conversation with Keen
an without hoping he’d act like the rest of them. None of my cues got through to him.
Then there was the question of if I’d even go back to work now that I’d heard his personal statement. Whatever my growing feelings about him were, nothing about what happened indicated I was anything other than a fly on the wall to him. He’d been able to fish an opinion out of the new girl, big deal. I wondered if he’d go back to being an invisible presence in the office, my world at work returning to Martin and the terrible job I had.
If I was going to do something with these tapes, I felt I had to do it soon. Going in the next day, I’d gotten my convictions up that Keenan should’ve taken his legally advised opportunity to ask me out, because that would be the only thing keeping me from purposefully trying to get fired and suing him on account of his harassing staff and hostile work environment.
I waited at my desk with the computer off for Martin to come by with his orders for the day. He didn’t disappoint, only now it was becoming apparent that he was more vexed by my continued presence as well. He hadn’t been shaving, and his lip curled with disdain.
“Right then, we need some of your expertise in the kitchen. The fridge has gotten filthy and I think someone spilled milk in there overnight. The cabinets too. Off you go,” he said, starting to turn away.
“I don’t think so,” I said, standing up as he wheeled around.
“Excuse me?” He glared at me. “I’ve told you before you’re welcome to stop at any time. The door is that way.”
“That’s not how this works,” I said forcefully to him. “You hired me to do a particular job, but now the things you’re asking me to do have been degrading and sexist. The answer is for you to uphold your proper obligations as an employer, not to pressure me to quit.”
