“She probably teaches choir,” the ringleader says, as if nothing could be lamer.
“Or the recorder.”
“No, the piccolo. Picture it, she’s a giant.”
“I am not a giant,” I retort.
“You’re taller than Mr. Kennedy.”
“He’s got an inch on me,” I say, taking the bait, which is exactly what I advise the Minister against.
“Are you kidding?”
“You towered over him.”
“It must be the heels,” one says to appreciative snickers all around.
In a feeble attempt to recover some ground, I ask, “So, you’re all musical, ladies?”
“So, you’re all musical, ladies?” They echo in unison.
“Six-part harmony— I’m impressed,” I say. “A choir unto yourselves.”
Snorts and eye-rolling. Then Alpha Teen speaks up: “What do you do, ma’am?”
Ma’am! “Why do you want to know?”
“We want to know if you’re good enough for Mr. Kennedy. Duh.”
“Probably not, but to satisfy your curiosity, I’m a speechwriter.”
“Yeah? For who?”
“For whom,” I say. Oops. More eye-rolling. “For the Minister of Culture.”
“Whatever.”
“Boring.”
“Do you ever stop talking about yourself?”
Recognizing I have no hope of winning this battle, I try to cut my losses: “I’d love to stick around and chat, but…”
“We’ll wait for you,” Alpha thug offers.
“Look, you should go keep Mr. Kennedy company.”
They shuffle off a few yards and pause, whispering and giggling. If this were a movie, I’d be able to make a dignified exit about now, but because it’s real life—or at least, my real life—the only option is to open the door of the nearest Porta Potti and step inside.
The smell is almost overwhelming, but I lock the door and start breathing through my mouth. “Don’t look down, don’t look down,” I chant to myself. I look down: it’s inevitable. Somehow, I manage to do my business without stumbling off my heels or touching anything. There’s a rattle at the door as I’m peeing: the girls must be trying to catch me in the act. Like I’m stupid enough to leave the door unlocked!
The stench is starting to turn my stomach by the time I turn to unlatch the door. It won’t open. I jiggle it, then push on it but it’s clearly jammed. Panic rises in my throat as I realize that the girls have locked me in. Oh God. I can already feel the bacteria eating at my skin but I try to relax: the concert is only half over. There are hundreds of people in the park and some of them will need to pee. At the moment, however, all is silent.
“Hello? I’m stuck here! Hello!”
When I pause to listen for a response, I hear the band start again in the distance and my heart sinks. Traffic around here is likely to be slow until the concert is over. I could suffocate before anyone finds me.
“HELP! HELP!”
I’m banging vigorously on the door when it occurs to me that things could get a whole lot worse if I tip the place over. Better to chill out. In fact, the air doesn’t seem quite so foul now; I must be getting used to it. My feet are killing me, though, so I lower the lid of the toilet, cover it with strips of tissue and take a seat. Every so often, I offer up a plaintive “help” and finally I start to cry, chafing my nose with low-grade toilet tissue. This is definitely the worst date I’ve ever had.
Darkness is falling on my humble retreat when I finally hear footsteps.
“HELP!” I yell.
“Libby?” It’s Tim.
“Over here!” I shout.
The door swings open and Tim reaches in to help me escape. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say, sniffling. I’d blow my nose, but I’ve got my purse in one hand and he’s still holding the other.
“There was a stick jammed in the handle,” he says. “Someone deliberately locked you in.”
“Someone! It was your students. Those thugs.”
“Libby, I’m sorry, they’re a handful sometimes. All of them have difficult home lives and they act out.”
“I can’t feel any sympathy for them at the moment,” I say, sounding as sulky as I feel. “Would you mind if we just went home now?”
“Come on, Libby, where’s that notorious sense of humor?”
“It corroded in there.”
Tim is clearly disappointed but I just want to get out of this ridiculous outfit and into a warm tub with plenty of perfumed bubble bath. I have never felt less sexy in my life.
“I’ll talk to them on Monday, don’t worry.”
“Talk to them? This calls for corporal punishment!”
He schticks to cheer me up on the drive home but I can’t rise to the occasion. Convinced that potty fumes are clinging to me, I roll down my window. Tim opens his too. I must really stink. When we finally pull up in front of my place, I jump out of the car mumbling, “Thanks.” He calls out after me.
“Let me make this up to you, Libby. Could we try again next week?” I don’t see the point when we’re clearly jinxed. As he gives me a hopeful smile, he adds, “Please.” I relent.
“Well, okay.”
“I’ll call you!”
He won’t call.
The phone is ringing but I decide to let voice mail take care of business. My shoes are propped on the desk and I’m savoring the last morsel of a chocolate bar. It’s the first I’ve allowed myself in two weeks and I resent the intrusion. Who could blame me for the indulgence, given my recent trauma? The phone rings again a few minutes later and my professionalism wins out.
“Libby McIssac.”
“Hi, Libby, it’s Janet from the Legislative Library. I’ve solved your mystery.”
“Thank you so much, Janet. I’ve almost finished the speech and there’s a perfect spot for the Minister to recite this poem.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Something in her tone tells me there’s a rewrite ahead of me. “The lines she gave you aren’t from a poem.”
“No? What are they from?”
“A song, actually.”
“A song? Well, that could work.”
“Probably not for the Opera Company: it’s by Sawdust.”
“Not the brother/sister duo from the ’70s?”
“Allow me,” Janet begins: “As a girl I listened to the radio, Belting out my favorite songs…. I think they knew I sang along, It made them smile…”
“It’s schmaltzy, but pleasant enough,” I say. “And the Minister likes it.”
“I’m just getting started: Every la-la-la, every Dosie-do-do, sunshine… Maybe you’re right, Libby—it is perfect for the Opera Company.”
“Okay, I get your point.”
But Janet is enjoying herself too much to stop: “Every ting-a-ding-ding, the bells are starting to ring….”
“All right, already!” She sneaks in a swooping “Good times” before I cut her off. “Look, how was I to know? Sawdust was a ’70s band. I was like, five.”
“Every dosie-do-do…”
“Janet, librarians are supposed to be quiet and shy.”
“I’ll fax over the lyric sheet so the whole audience can sing along.”
I hear one last wo-wo-wo before the line goes dead.
16
“As promised!” I announce dramatically to the shadowy form behind Margo’s desk.
It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. No wonder she prefers to raid my stash of snacks—she’d need night-vision goggles to find her own in here. Using the glow from the computer monitor to guide me to her desk, I present the speech for the Opera Company with a bow and a flourish.
“It took me most of the weekend, but I think the Minister is going to be pleased,” I say. I actually finished in time to meet Emma for a late lunch on Saturday, but I’m not about to share that with the Dungeon Master.
Ignoring both speech and amateur dramatics, Margo looks up from her computer.
“The Minister has hired a private political consultant who’s flying in from London tomorrow to advise all of you on how to improve our image.”
I’m not fooled by her apparent nonchalance. There’s a chocolate chip cookie sitting uneaten on her desk—she’s plenty worried. I just hope the consultant is a guy: we could use some testosterone on the executive team.
“Is there a reason you’re still here, Libby?”
“Yes, actually. The speech…?”
“What speech?”
“The one I just put on your desk—for the Opera Company?”
She looks down at the speech as though wondering how it got there.
“Oh, that. I’ll look at it when I have the time.”
I beat a hasty retreat before she snaps out of her daze and questions me about the state of the reference shelf. On the way back to my desk, I bump into Bill and ask if he’s heard the news about the new consultant.
“Yeah, I heard, all right. It’s Richard Neale. I can’t believe she’s hiring that arrogant son of a bitch.”
“You know him?”
“He’s a friend of the Clearys’ and I’ve driven him around when he’s been in town. Thinks he’s better than the rest of us just because of that posh British accent. It’s phony, if you ask me. He’s from Yorkshire, for God’s sake—farm country—but he acts like he was to the manor born.”
“A real snob, huh?”
“Take it from me, Libby, the man’s a pain in the arse.”
I’m waiting by the microwave for my soup to heat up when I learn that the Ego has landed. Two female admin staff spill into the kitchen, abuzz with the news.
“Who was that?” one asks, fanning herself with a Lean Cuisine box.
“I don’t know, but I’d sure like to! What a hunk! And that accent!” The woman extends her hand to her friend in an imitation of Richard: “Good Aufternoon. That’s an absolutely charming jumper you have on.”
Please. So the man has an accent and a little polish. Big deal. In my experience, the private sector consultants are always smooth. They arrive wearing expensive navy-blue suits and expressions of bemused tolerance— Big Business riding into town to clean up the Bungling Bureaucracy. Yet, time and again I’ve watched them crumble under the red tape, delays and mixed messages of government. The strain begins to show when the suits are replaced by bad casual wear. Their hours get shorter, their meetings get longer and all thoughts of reforming us vanish. By the time they’re fully assimilated, you couldn’t pick them out of a crowd of civil servants, except for their bulging wallets. I give this guy six weeks.
The women’s twittering is making my head ache so I collect my soup and head down the hall to dine in the relative peace of my cubicle. Rounding a corner, I nearly run into Margo, who’s leading a very tall, well-built man in a navy suit toward the boardroom. This must be Richard Neale but he doesn’t seem like such hot stuff to me. Margo hurries past without a glance, but Richard, who accidentally clips me in the shoulder, stops to apologize.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” he says, squeezing my arm gently before rushing after Margo.
Whoa! The hairs on my arms are all standing at attention and as I turn to watch Richard’s broad shoulders disappear into the boardroom, I feel my brain roll over, kick a few times and die. Surely Bill is mistaken about this guy; he seems perfectly delightful. But perhaps a fatal blast of pheromones has disengaged my usually stellar capacity for reasoning.
Back at my desk, I’m very much aware of Richard’s presence in the boardroom nearby. The Minister is giggling and even Margo’s voice has a breathless quality. There’s also a constant stream of women passing my cubicle to stroll by the boardroom. Evidently, the pheromones have already penetrated the building’s ventilation system.
“How can you sit there so calmly?” Laurie says, peeking around my partition. The fast, high tone of her voice betrays that she too has been affected by Richard’s magic—and this is a woman who is so happily married I usually want to slap her.
“Don’t tell me you’re on your way past the boardroom too?”
“You bet I am. Richard is hot! Haven’t you met him yet?”
“Well, we haven’t been formally introduced, but I’ve seen him.”
“And…?”
“And I suppose he’s attractive enough.”
“Playing it cool, huh? Well, then I won’t bother to share what I’ve learned about him.”
I pull a Mars bar out of my drawer and surrender half of it to her. “Spill it, sister.”
Laurie laughs and perches on the corner of my desk and tells me that Richard is divorced, currently single and living in Chelsea, an upscale London neighborhood. Although he’s a renowned political consultant, the stock market is behind his great wealth. He received a modest inheritance as a teen and parlayed it into a small fortune by the time he was twenty-five. He met Mrs. Cleary and her husband, Julian, at an alumni event at Cambridge and despite the difference in their ages, they’ve been close friends ever since. The Minister is particularly fond of him.
“So,” Laurie concludes, “I’m heading down to the coffee machine. Care to join me?”
From the coffee machine, one can enjoy an unobstructed view into the boardroom. “I could use a coffee.”
I steal a good look at Richard as we pass the open door. His suit looks expensive, as does his shirt and tie, but when my eyes slide south, I’m surprised to discover that he’s wearing fancy, fringed loafers with a pointy toe.
“Did you check out the shoes?” I whisper to Laurie when we reach the coffee machine. “He’s wearing party pumps.”
“Maybe that’s the height of fashion in London.”
“Or maybe it’s a big mistake.”
“Are you saying you’d reject him on the basis of his footwear?” Laurie asks.
“I’m saying he’ll need the services of a friendly native to help him get dressed in the morning.”
“It looks like Mrs. Cleary is already applying for that position.” Laurie nods in the direction of the boardroom where the Minister is currently straightening Richard’s tie. “Not that Richard seems to mind,” she adds.
“He’s probably just being polite,” I say. “Do you think he realizes how attractive he is to women?”
“I’d say he’s pretty confident of his appeal, yes.”
“He’s awfully manly for a civilized Brit. Maybe he was blessed with two Y chromosomes.”
“Well, if you ask me, two Y’s spell trouble.”
What’s a little excessive masculinity between colleagues? I could help him find more constructive uses for that testosterone.
Richard has rearranged the furniture in his office so that his desk now faces the door. I know this because I’ve been devising lame excuses to stroll down the hall past his office. For example, I’m catching up on my photocopying, what with the copy room being near his office. I also take the long way round to the washroom and back. It’s pathetic, but I’m in good company: who knew so many women worked in the building?
Ashamed, I consult with my self-help library and discover a volume entitled, Flirt Now, Marry Later. It confirms that the parade is a time-honored courtship ritual and offers the following guidelines:
Preen before setting off; fluff hair and apply lipstick;
Invent feasible excuse for mission;
Walk briskly and with purpose toward destination;
Look straight ahead, shoulders back, hips swaying;
Smile ever so slightly so as to look caught up in fascinating life, yet still attainable.
If I tried all that, I’d blow a circuit, but fortunately, even my feeble attempts are generating good results: I’m almost certain Richard looks up as I’m passing and tracks me with his eyes. The book doesn’t indicate whether it’s allowable to laugh once you’re out of sight, but I do— I can’t take the game that seriously. Just the same, I find myself pondering the relative merits of thong underwear. If he’s going to monitor my backside, perhaps I should g
ive him less to look at. On the other hand, given my expanding girth, I’m better off with something more binding.
I’m still tabulating the pros and cons of various undergarments when I overhear Richard’s deep voice greeting our receptionist on the other side of my partition:
“Good morning, Nancy. Where might I get a decent cup of tea around here?”
“I’m fine, thanks!” Nancy replies, before adding, “I love tea.”
What is it about Richard that is reducing all of the women—and some of the men—on our floor to idiocy? I’d love to set up a few cameras around the office to study the phenomenon—maybe do a little in-house reality television show.
We open with a view from the Ladies’ Bathroom Camera where the audience witnesses a dozen women jockeying for a position in front of the mirror. They’re fluffing and preening and turning to examine their profiles. Some are describing what they’d do if they got Richard alone for a night—or even for twenty minutes in the office boardroom. Several discuss sharing him. The giggling is deafening. After a final adjustment of panty hose and bras, they sashay out the door one by one.
We cut to Hall Camera, which picks up Richard swaggering past the ladies’ room, seemingly oblivious to the steady stream of well-groomed women—all staring straight ahead with expressions of studied nonchalance. The audience is wowed by Richard’s cool demeanor in the face of such temptation, but wait! What’s Hall Cam picking up now? As the women pass, Richard waits a beat, then cranes his neck around to do an ass check. No human has ever before shown such flexibility of the cranial vertebrae. It’s almost reptilian.
Let’s cut to Cubicle Cam for a closer look at the action. There’s our hero now, stopping at a few desks as he collects the information he needs to do his job. He’s charming his way from desk to desk while women stare agog like schoolgirls. Under Desk Cam reveals nervous trembling and crossed fingers. Special sensors pick up an increase of perspiration and blood flow to the privates.
Finally, Richard makes his way to his office and closes the door. Office Cam provides an insider’s view of primal man in his habitat. Viewers may be startled, and even horrified, as Richard belches (where’s that British polish now?). Under Desk Cam zooms in on the man’s crotch just as his large, well-manicured hand comes to rest upon it. The cameras will linger there, simultaneously titillating and repelling the viewer. The credits roll to end this week’s episode and the voiceover asks, “Will the Minister’s girls have their nasty way with Richard? Or will our hero choose self-love over a foursome on a boardroom table? Tune in next week to Much Ado about Dick to find out!”
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