by Linda Hawley
During that first interview with Bennett, his passion for the technology was palpable—and contagious.
“Do you realize,” he asked me with excitement during the first interview, “that if less than 0.1 percent of ocean energy could be turned into electricity, no one on the earth would need fossil fuel?”
I was interested in that. I wanted to know that my work would mean something.
* * *
When I was hired by AlterHydro, the entire company was a ball of energy. It held some of the most valuable patents in the world. It was my job to write the technical manuals for the turbine. I was also responsible for writing the content for sales materials on the benefits of tidal power. With fossil fuels continuing to climb and gasoline selling for over eight dollars per gallon, it wasn’t difficult to get caught up in the high morale present at the company.
Working for Bennett proved to be challenging, however. He was, as in the interview when I first met him, charming, personable, passionate, and intuitive. But he was also arrogant, and he frequently flaunted his Mensa-level intelligence to overpower others. His being a control freak was only icing on the cake.
I had to mentally prepare myself to meet with him this morning.
Come on, you’d better go see him.
I took a long drink of my Mountain Dew to force sugar-induced over-enthusiasm, then stood from my desk, scooping up the latest version of the technical manual.
“Lulu, stay,” I gently commanded my dog after she rose to follow me. “You wouldn’t want to go with me anyway, girl.”
One of the fringe benefits of working at AlterHydro was that we could bring our dogs to work. Lulu was a Brittany Spaniel I had bought as a puppy from a private breeder I’d met in Washington three years before. Easily trained as a puppy, she now knew more than twenty commands. Lulu came to work with me every day, watching and smelling the goings-on with curiosity.
Pausing at my desk, I looked at the other basement dwellers of the 1910, the name we called our century-old building. I loved the old brick building; it was where the town’s first newspaper had started. We shared common journalistic roots, and even though the 1910 had been renovated many years before, the old smells of ink and paper seemed to linger like its own earthy perfume.
My stream of consciousness shifted subtly from the smell of the 1910 to the smell of Bennett’s Calvin Klein cologne.
Ugh.
One of my lesser-known, more unfortunate abilities was my acute sense of smell. I couldn’t explain it, really, but it was true; if it was there, I could smell it. My smelling abilities were more of a curse than a blessing; there are some things that no human should ever have to smell. It wasn’t just the smells themselves that overpowered me. I also, for some inexplicable reason, had an overdeveloped smell memory.
From a smell, I could remember the situation I was in when I first smelled it, which was occasionally useful, but mostly annoying. It was similar to a photographic memory, but sensory. Some smells triggered intense flashbacks to memories I’d worked to forget. But there was no help for it; it was sensory déjà vu.
When I was in my freshman year of college, I briefly dated a guy whose putrid breath could not be disguised by his frequent and liberal use of Calvin Klein cologne. Though Bennett’s breath was significantly better than that of the guy I’d dated in college, his cologne choice still brought on halitosis flashbacks.
There was no need to take the vintage elevator to meet with Bennett; it would take three minutes and thirty-three seconds for the elevator to arrive in the basement. I had timed it one day while waiting. It was as though the elevator itself was reluctant to enter the dark abyss. I could walk up the stairs to Bennett’s office faster.
At least I’ll burn a few calories while I’m at it.
I took the stairs two at a time. I’d been a runner all my life, and because of the number of calories expended through long-distance running, I ate what I wanted when I wanted but still remained fit and toned. I was vainly proud of my round behind, even though most long-distance runners had no booty to speak of. Men always told me that my spirit was young, but I think they may have been looking at my backside.
I took in a deep breath. Only two flights to go.
At forty-four years old, I’d come into my own in so many ways. I had my daughter, Elinor, who was now away at her first year of college. I was technically an empty nester, which felt odd, considering that I still felt so young.
As I arrived on the top floor, where Bennett’s Calvin Klein cologne beckoned me, I braced myself for the nasty déjà vu to come. My too-frequent silent self-talk began as I started my death-row trek down the wide art-lined hall to the huge corner office. I had been there many times, in its urban luxury, with sparse furnishings that drew the eye toward the sea through the floor-to-ceiling windows that faced Bellingham Bay. Bennett was a sailor and loved the water. When he first gave me a tour of his office, he told me that he had chosen it for the corner view of the bay to help him think.
I knocked once on his open door, and he looked up and replied with a smile, “Come on in, Ann.”
“Hi, Bennett,” I warmly offered, handing over the manual while attempting to hold my breath and smile at the same time, amid the sea of Calvin Klein.
“Hey, Ann. Thanks for bringing this up. I really wanted to look it over before you got too far down the path. I really should have seen it sooner. I didn’t realize that you were already writing this section,” Bennett responded with annoyance.
His concern was unwarranted. It seemed as though he should have bigger concerns as the company’s president, and I didn’t understand why he insisted on keeping such a close eye on the progress of the technical manual. I tried to refrain from frowning; it wasn’t as though he was grooming me for management. There was no such thing as upward mobility at AlterHydro.
“I thought I’d get a head start,” I answered. “I know it’s your keystone project this quarter.” My smile was forced, and I hoped he wouldn’t notice. “I can see you want to look through it, so why don’t I just pop back later to pick it up?” I turned to go, but he stopped me before I could reach the door.
“Oh no, I won’t need it for very long,” he interrupted. “Hang tight for a few minutes—have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the chair.
Oh please, not again. I reluctantly sat on the very edge of the seat across from the huge oak desk. The last time this happened, I was here for forty-five minutes while he read the manual…sitting here with the memory of putrid-breath hijacking my mind.
Just as I was resigning myself to a morning of torture, Bennett closed the cover of the manual and said, “You know, Ann, I think I'd like to spend a bit more time reading this. I’ll have my assistant send it back to you later, okay?”
I perked up from my perch, genuinely smiled, and replied, “Sure. No problem. Glad to help.”
“Ann,” Bennett called out as I was escaping through the door.
“Yes?” I replied, turning back towards him.
“You look nice today. That color sets off the light blue in your eyes.”
“Thanks. Enjoy that manual.” I smiled as I left his office.
I’m a sucker for a compliment, dang it. If he’d lay off the Calvin Klein, I might be able to like him.
I strode down the hall toward the stairs, eager to find fresh air.
It wasn’t until I was a few steps away that the thought dawned on me. Is he hitting on me again? I hoped not.
Last year when we were on a business trip together in San Francisco, Bennett got hammered on Tequila shots after our dinner and started flirting openly with me. Chalking it up to the numerous drinks he’d had, I had let the flirtations slide. His 5'6" height combined with his skinny one hundred twenty pounds didn’t ignite anything in me. We were simply not compatible physically. Even with his piercing ocean-blue eyes, I couldn’t be tempted.
I was skilled at deflecting flirtations by executives, having refined my technique during my years as a reporter. No w
oman could be a successful journalist without becoming an expert in the art of the sexual brush-off. I did have a gift for extracting information from drunken sources, though, without offending my target’s sensitive ego or getting myself in sticky situations.
During the same evening of drunkenness, Bennett unloaded on me the full details about how he wanted to leave his family’s business and start out on his own. He had great dreams of developing his own innovative new technology so that he could break free of the family.
I used my refined deflecting maneuver in dealing with flirtatious Tequila-Bennett, even when he tried to cop a feel of my bootie that night.
Did he even remember that? Well, I made it through another encounter, I thought, cruising toward the stairwell.
I opened the door and sucked in a deep breath of stairwell air, nearly running into the vice president of sales, Blake Benz.
“Hi, Blake,” I offered with an enthusiastic smile.
He burst out laughing. “You didn’t have to endure the Calvin Klein again, did you, Annie?”
Ever since I had my job interview with Blake, the only non-family member of the executive staff, I had good rapport with him. He was attractive, in his midthirties, and had a head of short, thick, dark brown hair that he styled with gel. His hazel eyes twinkled when he smiled, and his face was covered with freckles. He was my height, with a bulky athletic body; he knew he was attractive but didn't flaunt it. He never wore a tie in the office, instead opting for Izod golf shirts.
Blake was the office sports junkie; he ran the fantasy football league and coached his son’s baseball team. He had an easy laugh with a dry sense of humor. Blake was professional when I interviewed for the job and gave me the thumbs up for hire. He was always politically correct and seemed to have full control of his emotions and what he shared with others, but he wasn't reserved. In a nutshell, Blake was everything that I wasn't. He was admired by both the family executives and his sales team. Blake was the only one in the company to call me Annie, a name he’d adopted for me suddenly one day and had called me ever since.
“Ooh, that Calvin Klein was screamin’ today,” I responded sarcastically.
He laughed.
“Now what would life be, Annie, if you didn’t have that kind of excitement?”
“Hmmm.” I smiled, pretending to seriously consider his question. “Refreshing?”
“So, how are things with the basement exiles?” teased Blake.
“What do ya mean? Those are my people.”
Chuckling sincerely, he replied, “I gotta run, Annie. Bennett asked for these sales estimates.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Hey, rock on,” he added, his classic end for stairwell chitchat.
Lulu greeted me when I arrived downstairs again. “Hi, girl,” I said, patting her on the head. She sniffed me. “I know, you smell it too, don’t you?” I asked, petting her attentively.
Back at my desk, breathing the comforting musty basement air, I dove into my chocolate stash that I kept in the bottom left drawer of my desk. I had earned a treat. After a few pieces of my milk-chocolate-covered raspberry decadence, I leaned back in my chair and looked around at the 1910 basement exiles. There were only two of them.
Paul, a computer geek, was the genius behind all the company’s software technology. He was a beautiful man, tall, with a lanky body, short blond hair, and intense brown eyes. I was sure that Paul had a six-pack underneath his shirt, and from time to time I fantasized boldly walking over to him and simply cutting his shirt off with my scissors to verify the fact. He had an easy smile and laugh and a great sense of weird humor. His wealthy parents had sent him to Harvard when he was only sixteen. It was commonly known at AlterHydro that the Pressentins thought that Paul walked on water. He was about as close as you got to being in the family.
Paul was well kept. He also had a crush on me since the day I arrived at AlterHydro. He’d never really made the effort to pursue me, but I knew of his attraction by his attentiveness and the way he always smiled at me when making eye contact. Paul was the whole package, and from time to time I needed to remind myself to forget that. There were rules against employees dating, and the last thing I wanted to do was get fired because I couldn’t keep my hands to myself.
Edwin, the other basement exile, was a mechanical engineer who designed the tidal turbines and ensured that the Chinese-manufactured products were free of engineering defects. He was five foot nine, handsome, with jet-black hair and kind, dark eyes. It seemed that every week Edwin was testing some new material in the basement. He also had a regular habit of blowing up food in the microwave. Edwin was Chinese and one of the most book-smart men I had ever known. He worked hard to fit into American culture, but it seemed to be impossible for him. He spoke perfect English, but no slang ever slipped through his lips nor did he ever use contractions in speech, so he always sounded so formal. Edwin was socially awkward, lived in his head, and was always concerned about American propriety. I wanted to tell him that Americans in 2015 no longer had any real propriety, but I didn’t want to break his heart. When Edwin didn't know something, he kept his mouth shut, unlike most Americans.
Both Paul and Edwin were in the basement for two simple reasons: they needed a good deal of space for their equipment, and their work was interconnected, with Paul writing software to run Edwin’s designs. I was likely there because of the proximity to them, for they supplied much of the subject matter that I wrote about. We weren’t truly exiles, but being in the musty basement qualified us.
After I got over the initial shock of the location of my office, I was willing to find the bright side to my subterranean refuge. It was a huge space, so I chose wherever I wanted my desk to go, and even got to pick from the furniture dogpile left by ex-employees. After the first week, however, I moved my desk a second time, putting distance between Edwin’s burnt microwave scents and myself. It didn’t help much, though. This was one example of the downside of my smelling acuity. In time I was able to get Bennett’s approval for an air filtration unit for the basement.
Getting the filtration unit was no small feat, though, given that the corporate office manager, Vicki, would balk at ordering a simple high-quality pair of scissors. She would buy the cheapest of everything because she received a quarterly bonus tied to how much she saved of her supply budget. After two pairs of scissors resembling government-issued 1950s-era models fell apart, I marched upstairs to demand that the 350-pound, polyester-covered, fifty-year-old virgin order me a decent pair of scissors. You would’ve thought that I’d asked the woman to donate a kidney. Vicki fought me outright, refusing to buy the scissors. Finally in complete frustration, I sent Bennett an email:
Hello Bennett:
Please authorize Vicki to order me a sharp pair of high-quality scissors. The cost is $15.99. The model is shown below.
Thank you, Ann
Bennett replied directly to the micro-manager, copying me, with a one-word email:
Approved
Bennett had been down that road with Vicki many times. It was common knowledge that he didn't think much of her; she was hired by Bennett’s grandfather in his first business thirty years previously—Vicki was a Pressentin family lifer.
About two weeks after I got my high-quality scissors, they disappeared. I looked for them everywhere, and then it occurred to me that the old maid had probably stolen them, just to prove that she was the one with the power. To check my theory and to validate that paranoia wasn’t actually taking root in my brain, I privately asked Paul to check the digital security log to see if she had been there the night my scissors disappeared. Sure enough, the thief came back into the building at nine that night and left fifteen minutes later. Paul said those types of events had been happening for years at AlterHydro.
I bought my own scissors and put my name on them with permanent marker.
Sometimes this place is an alternate reality, I thought, reflecting on the scissor-heist.
“It’s time I go work ou
t,” I suddenly announced to no one.
Lulu stood. She knew what that meant.
As I picked up the workout bag beside my desk, I excitedly said, “Come on, Lulu.” That got her bottom wagging. Brittany dogs have only a tail stub, so bottom wagging was all she could do. Her floor-polishing wobble always made me smile.
As she and I crossed the basement heading for the stairs, I smiled at Paul as he looked up from the web server he was working on, and he returned the smile.
Mmm good.
After walking up the steps and into the second-floor gym, I took my workout clothes to a dressing stall, pulled the curtain, and quickly changed. Lulu waited for me on the other side of the curtain; she knew the routine. I never was comfortable bearing it all in a gym locker room, especially after watching the movie Carrie one Halloween on TV when I was a kid. That movie scared the crap out of me.
Once dressed, we went into the adjacent gym and I set up Lulu on her own treadmill to the right of mine. This always elicited surprised remarks from the other employees. Then I got on the treadmill next to her and started to jog. I had always used running as a therapy to work through issues.
I’ve gotta find a way not to let Bennett get to me. I should focus on his good qualities and stop being so annoyed that he’s a control freak. Why does it matter anyway? If he were just a manager instead of an executive, you wouldn't be annoyed by his constant reviews, right? Right. Let it go.
In the middle of my self-therapy, Paul got on the empty treadmill on the other side of me. He was wearing running shorts that should have been outlawed after 1982. They were made of thin polyester, had a slit up the side showing the built-in underwear, and ended just below his groin.
We chatted pleasantly about work while we ran together, and the more I sweated, the less I thought about his shorts and his palatable Norwegian bloodline. I really did like Paul, and I enjoyed our physical chemistry. I was mindful and cautious of it, careful not to cross the co-worker line.
