TheCorporation

by Jesus Gonzalez

  Michelle wanted to cringe but refrained. She liked Jay, could tell he was a nice guy, and she liked his honesty. She didn’t want him to jeopardize his job by shooting off his mouth, but it appeared that’s what he was doing.

  The fat guy sitting at their table frowned. “It might be wise, Jay, if you refrained from...saying this kind of stuff.”

  “Why? I’m not at work. I’m at a public place, I’m not on the clock, so technically I can say whatever the hell I want, when I want.”

  “Mark’s right, Jay,” Barb said, regarding Jay calmly. “Perhaps you’d better tone it down. You are with business colleagues.”

  “Maybe the same rules should apply to you,” Jay told her. “Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking like a fish and getting fucked up. You do have to drive home, you know and after all...you are with business colleagues.”

  Barb’s eyes flared briefly in anger and Michelle quickly stepped in. “It is an interesting discussion,” she said quickly. “I mean, the whole topic of an employee’s personal privacy is a big topic today. It’s a topic Jay and I found interesting.”

  “Regardless, Mr. O’Rourke needs to learn to tone it down at times,” Barb said. Her voice was icy. “Even when he is at these so-called public places.”

  Jay snorted. “You’re delusional.”

  “And you’re immature!”

  “And you’re a—”

  Alan quickly cut in. “Your point has been made, Jay.” He glanced at Barb. “You too, Barb.”

  “I suggest if you don’t wish to talk business at these little gatherings you refrain from attending, Mr. O’Rourke.” Barb’s tone was complete business. “When you gather with colleagues from the office, you should expect that the course of discussion will be the business of Building Products.”

  “Maybe in your world, but not mine.” Jay lit another cigarette. “I like to shoot the shit with the people I work with, especially the ones I like. But if you want to have those stupid bullshit rules, fine with me. I’ll stop coming. Next time I want to hang with Paul or George, we’ll go elsewhere.”

  “Be thankful nobody from HR was here,” Alan said. He drained the rest of his beer. “I know we’re all here on our own time and that, technically, this isn’t a business meeting but more of a social gathering, but you still have to be careful about what you say around those you work with.”

  “Like I give a shit? Barb and Mark aren’t part of management. They can say whatever the hell they want to HR if they want to. It’s their word against mine, and what I say in public outside of work, on my own time, is my own business. When I’m at work, that’s a different story. But here? Outside of work on my time? Fuck that!”

  Michelle retained her steady, solid front. She drained the rest of her beer. “You know, it’s getting late. I should get back to my room.”

  “Yeah, I gotta go too,” Jay said. He rose from his chair. “Hey, this lively discussion was fun while it lasted but as they say, all good things must come to an end. Let’s shoot the shit like this again tomorrow.”

  Michelle got up and was relieved when Alan Perkins, her Corporate Financial co-worker, got up, too. “I want to get back to my hotel and put the finishing touches on that spreadsheet,” he said. He pulled on his coat.

  The other people at their table rose to their feet as well, and

  Michelle quickly gathered her purse and followed Jay out of the restaurant.

  Once outside she paused for a moment, waiting for the rest of their party to join them. Alan nodded at her. “See you tomorrow, Michelle.”

  “Have a good night,” she said, drawing her coat tight around her.

  “See you tomorrow,” Jay said, cigarette jutting out of his mouth. “Nice talking to you.”

  “Nice talking to you, too.” They shook hands quickly and Michelle said, “I hope you won’t get into any trouble for what you said in there.”

  Jay’s expression was immediate and easy to read: what, me get in trouble? “Nothing’s gonna happen. Most of the people that were here tonight have heard me say much worse. Besides, we’re not at work or on company time. You can’t be fired for talking about basic human psychology and behavior during your off hours, which is what this all boiled down to. Besides, I’ve got a solid work record to back me up and I’ve never had a negative mark in my review.”

  “Yeah, well, Barb didn’t look too happy.”

  “She never looks happy,” Jay said, casting a casual glance behind them at the restaurant entrance. The front door opened and a couple of patrons exited. Some of their party was among them. “Besides, despite all that bullshit she said in there, she can’t do shit. She’s not a manager, much less a supervisor. She’s just a lowly corporate ant like the rest of us. She just likes to kiss the butts of everybody higher up than her.”

  “Is she the type to go squealing to the higher-ups?” Michelle asked.

  “Probably.” Jay glanced at the loosely-knit throng of their Building Products colleagues and turned back to her. “Listen, I don’t want you to get in trouble so I’m gonna split. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay.” Jay took off into the parking lot and Michelle headed toward her rental car in the opposite end of the lot. The early Spring night was cool and the wind ruffled her skirt about her legs and she shivered. Right now all she wanted to do was get back to her room, turn the heat up, give Donald a quick call, and crawl into her pajamas and into bed. Maybe watch a little TV. Then she wanted to get through the rest of the week quickly and get the hell home.

  The evening’s discussion, especially Jay’s rant, flitted through her mind quickly and out of left field came a thought that hadn’t entered her mind in a long time. That little painful memory that emerged when Jay asked if she had kids. It settled in her as she let the car warm up, and as she drove away she found herself wishing she was home with Donald, where she was safe and secure and comfortable with the feeling that everything was going to be all right.

  SHE WOKE UP at three a.m. not even aware she was crying, and when she realized it she could only sob harder. She buried her face in her hands, still lying on her tummy from the position she’d been in when she woke up and, with the painful emotions from that old memory still fresh in her mind, and the aftermath from the dream it had left still tender in her consciousness, she curled up on her left side, drawing herself into a fetal position, and cried herself back to sleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MICHELLE JUMPED RIGHT into her work the following morning at Building Products and was so busy with meetings and strategy sessions with various personnel that she didn’t even think about Jay O’Rourke until that afternoon when Alan took her to the IT department and she saw his empty cubicle.

  She was sitting at the cube of an IT tech named Shane Newstead, who was explaining the Network Administration stuff. Michelle had been taking notes in the various meetings all day. Her plan was to begin preliminary work on developing her documentation tomorrow and meet with a few other key people. Jay was one of those people she wanted to meet with, and when the tech she and Alan were talking to finished, she asked, “Is Jay around?”

  “He’s not here today,” Shane said.

  “He was so tanked up on caffeine last night, he probably didn’t get to sleep till five a.m.,” Alan said and laughed.

  Shane nodded. “Yeah, he drinks coffee like a demon, but he can get by with little or no sleep. All I heard was that he wouldn’t be in today. I don’t know what’s up.”

  The thought that Jay had become a victim of some HR espionage as a result of last night troubled Michelle, but she quickly put that out of her mind and continued with the rest of her day. That evening she, Alan, and another Financial Consultant employee named Henry Wagner worked out of the conference room with the high level executives of the company as well as the Human Resources Director. They called out for pizza, and dinner was eaten amid the meeting. Michelle didn’t mind, but she was anxious to call it a day and get back to her hotel room.

  She got back to her r
oom at nine p.m., showered quickly and called Donald. “How’d your day go?” she asked.

  “Okay. Still dicking around with Red Rose on this testicular cancer thing. How’s El Paso, Texas?”

  Talking to Donald long distance like this was tough. She wanted to be home; wanted to be safe and snug in the evening chill of Spring. This was the first consulting job she’d ever had that required out of state travel and, while it was fun, she did not like being away from home. They talked for fifteen minutes then parted with goodnights. Michelle spent the rest of the evening watching a movie—Training Day with Denzel Washington—then fell asleep.

  Despite lying in bed, waiting for sleep to overcome her, thinking about that painful memory of the past as she drifted to sleep, she did not have the dream, nor did she wake up crying.

  Jay O’Rourke wasn’t in the office the following day, and after meeting with the last few staff members she needed to talk to before beginning her preliminary sketches of the product, she asked one of the IT techs she met yesterday, Rob Fegley, where he was.

  “My boss told me that Jay left Building Products.”

  “Huh?” The news was sudden and surprising. Michelle looked at Rob with a stunned expression. “You’ve got to be kidding! He quit?”

  “I don’t know if he quit officially or what,” Rob said, typing at his computer terminal. “But an HR person spoke to Joe this morning, and Joe told me and a few of the other guys that Jay is no longer with the company.”

  “That’s too bad,” Michelle said, trying to keep a neutral tone.

  As she continued with the rest of her day she found herself pondering the real reason for Jay’s departure. It would suck if he had actually been dismissed for shooting his mouth off the other night at the Lone Star. Could a company really fire you for that? For expressing your personal opinion about work in general in a public place, on your own time? Michelle was fairly confident that various issues like the First Amendment would protect Jay in a case like this if that was what really happened. At one point during the day she stumbled across his business card and made a note of it; in addition to his office and fax number, his cell phone number was listed. She wondered if his cell phone was a private one or if it was company owned. Maybe when she had time she would call him and find out. She could do so from her hotel room; what could it hurt?

  She mentioned this to Donald that evening. She’d left the office at five-thirty and stopped for take-out at a Barbecue place on the way back to her room and was just finishing her supper of a roast beef sandwich and soup when her cell phone rang. “So you haven’t seen this guy since Monday night?” Donald asked.

  “No,” Michelle said. She’d gathered the trash up in a plastic tie-off bag to take downstairs to the lounge where she’d deposit it in a trash bin there. She didn’t want the smell of leftovers in her room tonight. “Like I said, he kind of got in a tiff with some of his co-workers about employment in general. Technically, he was in the right. We were talking about social issues and some of his co-workers took exception to it. I’d hardly think you could be fired for discussing social issues outside of the work place on your own time.”

  “You would think, but the world has gotten nuttier lately regarding employment and business practices,” Donald said. She heard him sigh. “There’s some employers now who not only refuse to hire smokers, they’re firing people who don’t quit. They claim it costs more money to insure them. I read about one company that banned their employees from smoking anywhere! Even their own homes. They’ve actually fired people for it.”

  “Really?” Michelle asked.

  “I kid you not,” Donald answered. “As a doctor, if I encounter a patient who smokes I try to convince them to quit for health reasons. I cannot force them to quit. The decision is up to them, and it’s theirs to make. Plus, last time I checked, tobacco is still sold legally. Same with alcohol. I heard a similar case in which a company that had a policy against its employees drinking alcoholic beverages off company hours fired an employee because he was seen drinking a beer one night in a bar. Alcohol and tobacco both pose health risks, but they’re not illegal by any means. You can take that same kind of reasoning and apply it to people who are overweight—not just obese, because there’s actually discrimination laws that can protect obese people—but honest to goodness overweight people. Somebody who is twenty, maybe fifty pounds overweight but isn’t considered obese. Companies can use this same argument and fire those people for not losing weight or eating right. And if you break it down further, what’s to stop them from forbidding you to participate in certain sports during your off time? It all boils down to health coverage. They want to save money on it. Once you head down that path, it can get worse.”

  “I hardly think Jay got fired for what he said,” Michelle said. “But still—”

  “Corporations do a lot of weird things, honey,” Donald said. “I’m dealing with one now that doesn’t want to pay for a surgery that will not only save a man’s life, but will ultimately save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in long term care which they’ll end up paying anyway if they don’t approve the twenty thousand dollars upfront it will cost to cover the surgery. They just want to save as much money as they can for this quarter to meet their executive’s financial goals. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Michelle didn’t want Donald to go off on another tangent again so she changed the subject. “I might give him a call Friday,” she said. “I was supposed to meet with him today on this project anyway.”

  “Will you not meeting with him change the scope of your project?”

  “I met with a couple of the guys he worked with and they filled me in. I have enough to get started.”

  They talked for a little while longer and when Michelle hung up she found herself in a deep, melancholic funk. Talking about Jay brought the memories of their conversation Monday night to the surface; how he’d asked her if she had children and her response to that question, followed by that painful memory. That painful memory now burned in the surface of her mind, and she sat on her bed and pulled her purse to her lap. She rummaged through it, found her wallet and opened it up, flipping through the pictures.

  When she extracted the photos she let the tears come. Unbidden.

  Her daughter had been beautiful even though she’d been born two months premature. Eyes forever closed, skin dark pink, little hands splayed open, a white blanket covering her to her chest, Alanis Michelle Dowling looked just like her mother and nothing at all like the sonofabitch who’d fathered her. Thank God for that, but even if she did possess traces of Kirk’s features she would have loved her fiercely just the same. For now there were the photos, over five prints taken the day she was delivered prematurely and lost forever. Her only link to the best thing that had ever happened in her life.

  She was twenty-four years old when she became pregnant with Alanis. She’d been working at All Nation Insurance in Manhattan and hated every minute of it. Her parents had gotten her a job there—had insisted on it, actually. Michelle had wanted to go to college after graduation and major in art but her folks shot that idea down. Her mother told her it would be a waste of time going to school. Her folks could get her a job at All Nation, get her into a good position, and she could work her way up the ladder.

  There would be no need to waste four years of her life on a worthless degree when she could cut right through the line and have a secure job by the time she would have graduated. Against her better judgment she’d gotten a job at All Nation right away, mainly to make her parents happy, but she’d been unhappy. She’d spent the first four years working a variety of entry-level jobs by day and partying and getting into the underground rock scene at night. By the time she was twenty-two she’d worked herself into a fairly well-paying administrative position. It was there that she met Kirk Hummel, five years her senior and a budding middle-manager.

  By then her extra-curricular activities in music and art had taken a back seat. Her life revolved around work because it w
as expected of her. Michelle was an only child and both her parents had been staunch workaholics, completely dedicated to the corporate cause of their employer. Michelle had spent most of her childhood at daycares or in the care of her grandmother. Her mother pushed her into majoring in Business in high school and disapproved of any other career choice Michelle had—journalism, graphic arts, even architecture. “A good solid business education is what you need to better prepare yourself for our growing economy,” Mom had said. This mantra was repeated so often that Michelle finally gave in to shut her parents up. She chose business as a major in high school and her grades promptly fell. By the time she was twenty-two she was asleep at the wheel; a passenger in an automaton that looked like her and answered to her name. She woke up, showered and dressed, took the subway into Manhattan every morning, worked ten to twelve hours a day and came home. She had no time for her friends, her art, or any kind of social life. Until Kirk Hummel stepped in.

  Her relationship with Kirk was an affair, plain and simple. Secretly she’d hoped something more would come from it but it never did. Kirk showed his true colors when Michelle told him she was pregnant; the pregnancy was unintentional; she’d been on the pill but sometimes, as they say, shit happens. Kirk didn’t want to get married and, worse still, didn’t want to have anything to do with her or the child and promptly fled the state. Michelle had been too crushed to pursue any legal remedy that would help her financially.