Hard Feelings: A Novel

by Jason Starr

  After using my swipe card to unlock the front door, I entered my office at a little before eight o’clock. I picked up my interoffice cell phone at the desk, then went down the long corridor, by the secretaries’ cubicles, to my office in the sales department.

  At my old job at Network Strategies, where my title had been merely salesman, I’d had a big corner office with a spectacular view of the East River. Now, as a senior salesman at Midtown Consulting, I was crammed into a narrow, stuffy office with a single window facing the back of a building. I missed the prestige of a corner office. When you have one of the biggest, most luxurious offices at a company, you get special treatment. In the hallways or at the water cooler, people smile at you and ask you how your weekend was or whether you’ve seen any good movies lately. Or they might offer to help you at the copy machine, or ask you if they can pick up anything when they’re on their way to the deli. But now people barely paid attention to me. Sometimes when I was walking in the hallway I would smile at someone and they would look back at me with a blank face, as if I were invisible.

  Lately, I’d been regretting the decision I’d made seven months ago to leave my old job. When the offer came from the headhunter I had been at Network Strategies for nearly six years and I’d had no intention of quitting. Then I was offered this incredible package at Midtown, with a sixty-a-year base salary and better benefits. Usually, I hung up on headhunters, but that day I listened.

  At the time, there was no way of knowing that coming to Midtown Consulting would probably be the worst decision of my career.

  I followed my typical morning routine—turning on my PC, checking my e-mail and voice mail—then I went to the coffee machine to get a cup of black coffee with three sugars. Back at my desk, I logged on to a Lotus Notes scheduling program. I had no out-of-office appointments today, but there were a number of important callbacks I needed to make this morning, including to Tom Carlson, the CFO I had met with yesterday afternoon.

  I dialed Carlson’s number, expecting to reach his secretary, but on the second ring he answered.

  “Good morning, Tom,” I said, trying to sound as upbeat as possible.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Richard Segal—Midtown Consulting. How are you today?”

  After a long pause he said, “Ah ha.”

  “Great, thanks for asking,” I said. “The reason I’m calling, Tom, is yesterday I didn’t get a chance to tell you—we can knock an additional two percent off that quote, which should save your company an additional twenty or thirty thousand dollars over the course of the contract and—”

  “Yeah, I didn’t really get a chance to look that over yet,” he interrupted. “I’ll call you when I’m ready, okay?”

  “If there’s anything you don’t understand, Tom, or need clarification on I’d be delighted—”

  “Didn’t I tell you yesterday that I’d call you when I was ready to make a decision?”

  “Yes, but I thought you’d want to know—”

  “You know, I feel like you’re trying to talk me into doing something I don’t want to do,” he said, “and I don’t like having that feeling.”

  “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, Tom,” I said. “But the real reason—”

  “Look, why don’t we just forget the whole thing?”

  “I . . . Excuse me?”

  “I’ve decided I want to take my business elsewhere.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, unable to hide my frustration anymore. “I mean yesterday . . . at the meeting—”

  “We’re going to accept an offer from another firm, all right?”

  “But did you have a chance to look over our quote yet?”

  “I’m not interested in your quote.”

  Now I couldn’t control myself.

  “Then why the hell did you agree to meet with me yesterday?”

  “The truth? I forgot about the damn meeting until you showed up. Look, the answer is no, thank you very much. Goodbye.”

  Carlson hung up. Stunned, I held the receiver against my ear until the line started beeping, then I replaced it. I was still in shock. I couldn’t believe that all the months I’d spent working on the Carlson account had come to absolutely nothing.

  I closed my eyes and let out a long, deep breath. Then I took a swig of coffee and kept going.

  I reached several voice mails then, finally, I got a hold of Rajid Hamir, an MIS manager at Prudential I had been trying to reach for the past few weeks.

  “Hello, Rajid, this is Richard Segal at Midtown Consulting.”

  “Who?”

  “Richard Segal,” I said slowly. “Remember—we met last month and I gave you a quote a few weeks ago for those two NT consultants you were looking for?”

  “Sorry, we have no budget for that now,” he said. “Try again next quarter.”

  When I tried to schedule an advance appointment for next quarter, Rajid hung up on me.

  I made about a dozen more calls, finally reaching another prospect. But the guy said he was using another consulting firm right now, to call back next year. I dialed number after number with no success.

  Staring at the computer screen, I was suddenly exhausted and I was starting to get a headache. I went down the hallway into the kitchen area and poured myself another cup of coffee. A voice behind me said, “Hey, Richie, how’s it goin’?”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw the smiling face of Steve Ferguson. Steve was also a senior salesman at Midtown, but I’d always thought he belonged selling shoes instead of computer networks. Last month, for the second month in a row, he was Midtown’s salesman of the month, closing nearly half a million dollars of new business.

  “I’m all right,” I said, adding a third sugar to my coffee. “How about you?”

  “Got laid last night so I can’t complain,” Steve said, smiling out of the corner of his mouth. Then he slapped me on the back and said, “So how’re the sales coming along?”

  “All right,” I said, hating his guts.

  “Yeah? Did you close that MHI account yet?”

  “No, not yet,” I said, putting a lid over the coffee.

  “You’ve been working on that one for a while, haven’t you? What’s holding it up?”

  “Just waiting for the signed contract.”

  I stepped around him, trying to end the conversation, but he walked next to me, following me out of the kitchen.

  “So I closed that Chase deal I was working on,” he said as if I’d asked him how his sales were coming.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “Yeah, four consultants, nine-month project—you know, a tiny one. Should get me some nice commish, though. There’s also some other projects in the works—hopefully it’ll lead to something ongoing. Did you hear about the Everson deal?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s this new-media ad agency on Forty-second. Got the signed contract in the mail yesterday—three-fifty K. Hey, if you need any help closing that MHI account, I’m here to help you, man. Seriously, if you want me to throw a call for you, come to a meeting—anything I can do. I know how important it is to get that first sale under your belt.”

  “Thanks, I’ll think about it,” I said, fake smiling.

  In front of his office—a corner office—Steve stopped walking and said, “So I guess I’ll see you at the ten o’clock.”

  I stopped.

  “What ten o’clock?”

  “Didn’t you get the memo from Bob about the sales meeting today?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well, guess I’ll catch you later.”

  When I got back to my office I checked my e-mail log, but there was no message from Bob about any ten o’clock meeting. I called one of the guys at the help desk, figuring there must be a problem with my e-mail, but they said the system was fine.

  I went down the hallway to the cubicles where Midtown’s three junior salesmen worked. Peter Rabinowitz and Rob Cohen were busy on the phone, but John
Hennessy was working at his PC. John was clean cut, in his mid-twenties, working at his first or second job out of college.

  “Hi, John,” I said.

  “Richard,” he said, “how’s it going?”

  “Not bad, not bad,” I said. “Did you get a memo about a ten o’clock sales meeting?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, “Will I see you there?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I might be busy with a client.”

  As a final possibility, I wondered if Heidi, Bob’s secretary, had forgotten to send me the memo. I called her and asked her to hold my calls for the next couple of hours because I was going to be working in my office, figuring if I was supposed to attend a meeting she would tell me. But she agreed to take my calls without another word.

  I had seen this happen before at previous jobs and I knew exactly what it meant. When an employee, especially a senior employee, was suddenly shut out of meetings he’d better get his résumé ready because he was as good as gone.

  I called more leads from my database, determined to make something happen. But after two hours of nearly nonstop dialing I had zero success. I was starting to feel dizzy and light-headed when I saw myself in Michael Rudnick’s basement and heard his teenaged voice shouting, “You’re gonna feel it! You’re gonna feel it!” Like last night, my heart was racing. Fuck, this was all I needed in my life right now.

  I tried to get back to work, but I couldn’t get Michael Rudnick out of my head. I wondered if it was really him I had passed on the street yesterday. The guy I’d seen seemed too thin and fit to be Rudnick, and his skin looked too perfect. His “caterpillar” eyebrow would have been a dead giveaway, but yesterday his eyebrows had been hidden by dark sunglasses.

  I logged on to the Internet and did a “people search” for “Michael Rudnick” in Manhattan. The search returned two hits, a “Michael L. Rudnick” with an address on Washington Street and a “Michael J. Rudnick, Esquire” with an address on Madison Avenue. Michael J. Rudnick, the lawyer, seemed like the best possibility because the address—probably of an office—was around where I had seen him waiting to cross the street yesterday evening. Besides, the idea of Michael Rudnick as a lawyer made a lot of sense. As a teenager, he was controlling, arrogant, self-centered—all prerequisites for a career in law. “Lawyer” also fit the impression I had gotten of him on the street corner—wealthy, successful, very selfconfident about his appearance and his status. I also remembered the way he had grunted at me after we knocked shoulders, as if I were beneath him and inconsequential. But I definitely couldn’t see him as a trial lawyer. No, a guy like him would do something more impersonal. He was probably a tax attorney.

  It was nearing noon and no one had come to my office to tell me that I was missing a sales meeting. Realizing that I hadn’t eaten anything all day, I decided to grab a bite then come back to the office and hit the phones again.

  I went to the pizza place I sometimes went to for lunch on Seventh Avenue. It wasn’t particularly good pizza, but what did I care? Usually, I wolfed down my lunches so fast that I could be eating cardboard with tomato sauce and rubber cheese and I wouldn’t know the difference.

  I sat with my two slices at a table in the back, swallowing my bites half-chewed, obsessing about my shitty morning and my even shittier life. I’d always thought that by the time I was in my mid-thirties I’d be happily married, living in a big house in the suburbs, with two kids and plenty of money in the bank. Maybe Paula and I had spent too much in our twenties, taking those extravagant vacations to the Bahamas and Hawaii. Unlike everyone else in the world who seemed to be striking it rich in the stock market, we were broke. Our apartment was worth half of what we’d paid for it, thanks to a major building assessment, and except for our retirement funds we had almost no money saved, which was ridiculous for a couple our age. And then there were the credit-card bills and the utility bills and the new expenses that always seemed to be popping up. Of course, we could sell the apartment for a loss now, maybe rent a smaller place for a few years until our bills were paid. But we needed the tax break that we got from ownership and the rental would probably wind up costing the same as or more than we were paying now.

  I couldn’t finish my second slice. I left the pizza place and reemerged on Seventh Avenue. The air was thick and smoggy. It had been drizzling earlier—now the sky was clearing. I walked mindlessly for a while, then I stopped, realizing that I was on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, the same corner where I had seen Michael Rudnick yesterday. The corner was several blocks from the pizza place and I had no idea why I had walked there.

  From my office, I called Maison, a French restaurant on Second Avenue, and made a dinner reservation for seven-thirty. I had never eaten there before, but Paula loved French food and I wanted to take her someplace special to celebrate her promotion.

  I started making sales calls again, still getting nowhere. At around two-thirty, I got a call from Heidi, saying that Bob wanted to see me right away. I asked her what it was about and she said she had no idea.

  When I entered Bob’s office and saw him, sitting at his desk, staring at his computer monitor with a very serious expression, I figured he must have made the decision to fire me. I envisioned breaking the news to Paula tonight, then having to check the help wanteds on Sunday.

  “Take a seat,” Bob said without looking at me.

  Naturally, as president of the company, Bob had a huge corner office. I could see a sliver of Central Park through the north-facing window behind his desk, and the towering GE Building at Rockefeller Center to the east.

  Bob was short—about five-six—and he covered the large bald spot on the center of his head with a black yarmulke. He always wore what looked like the same white button-down shirt tucked into black slacks. He was in his late thirties or early forties. Sometimes when he saw me in the hallway he stopped to tell me some new joke he’d heard. I always knew that the main reason he seemed to like me, and why he had probably been reluctant to fire me, was because my last name was Segal. At my job interview, I could tell Bob had assumed that I was Jewish and I hadn’t corrected him.

  I sat in the cushioned seat across from his desk. For a while, he continued to stare at the computer monitor and I thought he might have forgotten I was in the room. Finally, he swiveled back toward the desk and said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. How are you?”

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “Getting warmer out there,” he said.

  “Warmer?” I said.

  “The weather,” he said.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Yeah, it has been nice lately.”

  “My wife and I are opening our country house in Tuxedo soon,” Bob said.

  “Great,” I said.

  We stared at each other.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I just called you in here to get the status on some of your accounts—see where you are and where you’re going.”

  “Okay,” I said, relieved to hear that I wasn’t going to be canned. Not yet, anyway.

  “First of all, Steve told me you’re pretty close to closing the Media Horizons account?”

  “Steve said that?”

  “So you’re not close?”

  “They’re just waiting for the budget to come through,” I said, giving the most obvious excuse for a delay.

  “Did they give you a timetable when you can expect to hear about it?”

  “A few days—maybe a week or two.”

  “Well, hopefully that one will come through. Are you working on anything else hot?”

  “A few things,” I lied.

  “Good. Which ones?”

  “I have a bid out for a couple of consultants, another for an outsourcing project.”

  My answers were smooth and confident and I knew he couldn’t tell I was full of shit.

  “Good—I’m glad to see you have a few irons in the fire. Hopefully, you’ll close all three sales and you’ll be off and running.”

  “That’s what I’m ho
ping for,” I said.

  “But, I have to be honest with you, Richard—I don’t like to hit my employees with any surprises. When I hired you to come work for me, you led me to believe you would bring some business with you. You remember that, right? And I’m sure you’re aware you’ve been working here seven months now and you haven’t made a single sale for us yet. Now, I know a lot of that is out of your control and I’m not blaming you for anything. But, at the same time, if your production doesn’t increase I’m going to have to reevaluate your position here at Midtown. I know you were a big producer at your old job and I know you can do it again. I also think you’re a nice guy and I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that you stay with our company for many years. But I’m also running a business here and I can’t keep a salesman on, on any level, just because he’s a mensch. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But don’t worry, I’m sure it won’t get to that point. I’m sure you’ll close the three sales you just mentioned and, before you know it, I’ll be giving you the award for salesman of the month. If there’s anything I can do to help you succeed at this company, please tell me what it is, and I’d be delighted to do it.”

  “I appreciate that, but there’s nothing you can do,” I said. “I just need to get some signed contracts, that’s all.”

  “Maybe you should let Steve Ferguson come with you to your next sales meeting, or go with him to one of his. I know you probably have your own techniques, but sometimes watching someone who’s been successful can be very helpful.”

  “I don’t think that’ll help me,” I said.

  “Maybe you should try it anyway,” Bob said. “You never know what might rub off on you. Hey, did you hear about the Polack who locked his keys in his car? He needed a hanger to get his family out.”

  I laughed politely at the dumb joke.

  “By the way,” Bob said as I stood up, “I don’t know if you heard, but we’re going to be doing a little remodeling in the office next week.”