The meeting is going on too long. She had gone in to see the CFO to discuss the budget layout and now, for some reason, they are talking about upgrading their accounting software: a long-term decision, the implementation of which would require much research, preparation, innumerable meetings, and the approval of the CEO.
She watches, detached, as the CFO leans back in his leather chair, now clearly in his element: a captive audience defenseless against the espousing of so much bullshit. Maddy wonders if this has to do with the low-cut sweater she’s wearing. She decides not. Dirk has always had a propensity for verbal diarrhea regardless of her attire.
He affects a level of casualness by clasping his arms behind his head, completing his full repose. Does he know he’s sporting a self-satisfied smirk on his face, or is he just so carried away baffling her with his illustrious knowledge that he is unaware? She wonders how it is possible that he is married. If she were his wife she would have grabbed his crossed ankles and dumped him over backwards in his executive chair immediately. She envisions him in his current position, dictating to his beleaguered wife on how she should make dinner while she stares at him, squalling baby on hip, in disheveled exasperation, wanting only to know if he wants green beans or broccoli with his pork chops.
By his intonation she senses Dirk is coming to the end of his accounting software reverie. She smiles blandly: a look of nondescript feigned interest and says, “It does seem like something that would benefit the department on a go forward, so we should definitely table this when we have a break in our schedules.”
Maddy grimaces inwardly as she eloquently floats that particular stream of nonsensical, non-committal buzzwords. As she always does when she was forced to speak in such a manner, she recalls the Organizational Behavior course she had taken in university and how enraged, discouraged and belittled she had felt taking a course which she felt had done nothing more than teach her some out-moded business concepts and the ability to string together a myriad of words in such a way as to render them meaningless.
She glances at her watch: it’s closing in on noon. She has been in with Dirk for over twenty minutes.
“Well Dirk, I have to meet someone for lunch shortly. So to revisit our earlier conversation: when our sales people travel to tradeshows, is that part of the sales or the marketing budget?”
The cornered animal look that flits across Dirk’s face helps her to understand why he has just embarked on a twenty minute conversation about AccPac. He doesn’t know how to answer her question, but is incapable of admitting this. Maddy wants to slam her head down his desk. Just say, “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you shortly,” she wills him, silently.
“Why don’t you liaise with Laura and Rick and start a dialogue on the expected outlay for sales travel in respect to tradeshows and draft up a summary of your recommendation for me,” Dirk responds.
And that is why you make $200,000 a year and I don’t, thinks Maddy as she solemnly nods her acquiescence, gamely gathering her pen, notebook and coffee, dropping them off at her desk and then leaving the office to attend her imaginary lunch date.
* * *
Maddy typically eats her lunch at her desk or in the lunchroom while making stilted conversation with members of the tech team whose various descriptions do little to belie what it is that they actually do for eight, ten and twelve hours a day while consuming incredible amounts of caffeinated cola and often coming into work unshaven, unkempt with red-rimmed eyes.
Given it’s April in Vancouver it’s raining, so Maddy opts to wander through Pacific Centre with the hordes of other downtown workers. She stops in at Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up a Cliff Bar for lunch (the idea of eating lunch alone was too daunting given that she hasn't brought a book with her and, besides, what if Dirk sees her? Better to seek solace in a variety of women’s clothing shops).
She chews thoughtfully as she drifts in and out of clothing, jewelry and lingerie stores. She doesn’t need anything, nor is she struck with the seemingly frenetic compulsion exhibited by her peers to consume and purchase endlessly. She has her extravagances, surely, but buying a top from a store that has been picked through by every other career-woman in the immediate vicinity isn’t hers. Besides, all the clothing is the same from store to store. Currently, the downtown professional women are: a) still drawing on their winter wardrobe of crisp white shirts under dark vests with fitted, flared trousers or; b) have broken into their spring wardrobe of printed A-line skirts and wrap blouses, accented with chunky necklaces.
She hates shopping, though she recognizes she has become more fervent in her anti-shopping status in recent months. She used to enjoy going downtown on weekends with her girlfriends and making an afternoon of it, but no more. There are a lot of noble reasons she can give for not wanting to shop and purchase: she doesn’t actually need anything; she prefers to support local, independent clothiers; she feels guilty carting Banana Republic bags back to the office, past homeless people with outstretched palms and knowing eyes. And surely her reasons do encompass all of these things, but somehow it is more than that. She has been stricken with some sort of general shopping malaise. After fifteen minutes of repeatedly assuring attentive salespeople that she is just looking, she buys a Globe and Mail and sits down with a coffee in the cafeteria at Sears.
Back at the office the rest of the afternoon is relatively uneventful. Maddy calls an impromptu meeting between the heads of sales and marketing and within two minutes is able to discern that neither of them care where salespeoples’ travel expenses relating to trade shows are captures since salespeople are commissioned on sales, and the head of marketing receives bonuses based on the overall profitability of the company as a whole.
Maddy recommends to Dirk that sales travel expenses be coded to marketing because she knows Dirk will oppose her idea as a matter of principal, and she wants them to be coded to sales because it’s easier for her. Dirk does not let her down.
She pulls on her coat at 5pm and catches the bus home.
* * *
Jonathan isn’t home when she arrives, which is pretty typical these days. The architects for whom he works have a pressing deadline to meet and it is with increasing frequency that he is coming home at 8 or 9pm at night.
Recently, Maddy jokingly suggested that he wasn’t in fact working, but was actually having an affair. Jonathan replied, “I’m too tired to have an affair,” which Maddy laughed at at first, but then began to mull over at random times. He hadn’t laughed when he had said it.
She likes to think – after being with Jonathan for close to five years – that she would know if he was cheating on her. She knows, also, that everyone assumes they would be able to deduce their partner’s infidelities. Furthermore, a couple of acquaintances of hers have been subjected to philandering significant others and both had been caught totally unaware.
But, like her mother intones, “If you don’t trust someone, what’s the point of being with them?” and so Maddy doesn’t believe that Jonathan is having an affair. Besides, with the exception of the middle-aged receptionist and a mousy CAD technician, Jonathan works with men. This is, assuming, that Jonathan isn’t sexually attracted to men.
She muses idly as she assembles dinner (she’s a horrific cook so she prefers to assemble things such as pasta and sauce, spinach salad and chicken breasts) what she would do if she ever found out that Jonathan was cheating on her. She decides that, after getting over her initial shock and surprise, she will have to meet this other woman. Jonathon doesn’t take intimacy lightly. In fact, even though he is eight years her senior she has had almost twice as many sexual partners as he. So it would be likely that if Jonathan did have an affair, that affair would be born out of something greater than lust: it would be a mutual understanding and appreciation of someone. Someone other than Maddy. It would be gentle and kind. If Jonathan ever slept with another woman that would be the woman he would leave Maddy for.
Maddy now feels slightly depressed as she strains the spaghetti noodles, as though Jonathan has already cheated. She tends towards worst-case scenarios which never materialize. She is adept at them.
Trying to shake off such depressing thoughts she turns on her stereo and listens to some Buena Vista Social Club. She pours herself a glass of wine as she sautés some prawns with garlic and olive oil.
She doesn’t stop to consider what – theoretically – Jonathan might do if the roles were reverse and it was he that caught her cheating. No need to ponder that, just yet.
* * *
Jonathan comes home at 8:30. She sees that he is trying to remain upbeat, though he is exhausted. He thanks her for dinner, lavishes praise on her even though her meal was bland and, as usual, not at all how she imagined it would be.
He says apologetically that he’s going for a run: he’s getting stiff from sitting at his desk for such long hours and she can see the tension in his back and shoulders by the way he moves. He invites her to come along, knowing she won’t. Knowing she goes to bed around 10 or 11pm. And she does refuse, politely, and tells him to enjoy his run and that she’ll probably be in bed by the time he returns.
She knows she could do a better job of hiding the hurt in her eyes, the feeling of rejection in her voice. Jonathan is tired and stressed and the last thing he needs is a reproachful girlfriend demanding consolation and reassurance from him. She tries to empathize, tries to put herself in his shoes after a long, frustrating day at work. How much would she have to give?
She gets up and starts to clear the table, stack up the plates for washing and he immediately pitches in. Maddy can tell by his movements that he’s wary of her, knows that she’s feeling a bit rebuffed.
After the dishes are cleared, the leftovers safely stowed he takes her hands in his as she reaches to turn on the sink faucet. “I’ll do it Maddy, okay?” he asks imploringly.
She starts to object but he interrupts her. “I’ll do them when I get back. Thanks for a great dinner,” he tells her, earnestly, insistently. He kisses her, hard, on her mouth and then goes to put his shoes on. She watches him pull on his hat, affix a blinking light since it’s now dark out, pull on a windbreaker and then leave the apartment.
When she sees him emerge on the street below she returns to the kitchen and commences doing the dishes. He’s tired: he shouldn’t have to do them today. Besides, she’ll probably be in bed when he returns and she doesn’t want him crashing around the kitchen, waking her up.
She watches, detached, as the CFO leans back in his leather chair, now clearly in his element: a captive audience defenseless against the espousing of so much bullshit. Maddy wonders if this has to do with the low-cut sweater she’s wearing. She decides not. Dirk has always had a propensity for verbal diarrhea regardless of her attire.
He affects a level of casualness by clasping his arms behind his head, completing his full repose. Does he know he’s sporting a self-satisfied smirk on his face, or is he just so carried away baffling her with his illustrious knowledge that he is unaware? She wonders how it is possible that he is married. If she were his wife she would have grabbed his crossed ankles and dumped him over backwards in his executive chair immediately. She envisions him in his current position, dictating to his beleaguered wife on how she should make dinner while she stares at him, squalling baby on hip, in disheveled exasperation, wanting only to know if he wants green beans or broccoli with his pork chops.
By his intonation she senses Dirk is coming to the end of his accounting software reverie. She smiles blandly: a look of nondescript feigned interest and says, “It does seem like something that would benefit the department on a go forward, so we should definitely table this when we have a break in our schedules.”
Maddy grimaces inwardly as she eloquently floats that particular stream of nonsensical, non-committal buzzwords. As she always does when she was forced to speak in such a manner, she recalls the Organizational Behavior course she had taken in university and how enraged, discouraged and belittled she had felt taking a course which she felt had done nothing more than teach her some out-moded business concepts and the ability to string together a myriad of words in such a way as to render them meaningless.
She glances at her watch: it’s closing in on noon. She has been in with Dirk for over twenty minutes.
“Well Dirk, I have to meet someone for lunch shortly. So to revisit our earlier conversation: when our sales people travel to tradeshows, is that part of the sales or the marketing budget?”
The cornered animal look that flits across Dirk’s face helps her to understand why he has just embarked on a twenty minute conversation about AccPac. He doesn’t know how to answer her question, but is incapable of admitting this. Maddy wants to slam her head down his desk. Just say, “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you shortly,” she wills him, silently.
“Why don’t you liaise with Laura and Rick and start a dialogue on the expected outlay for sales travel in respect to tradeshows and draft up a summary of your recommendation for me,” Dirk responds.
And that is why you make $200,000 a year and I don’t, thinks Maddy as she solemnly nods her acquiescence, gamely gathering her pen, notebook and coffee, dropping them off at her desk and then leaving the office to attend her imaginary lunch date.
* * *
Maddy typically eats her lunch at her desk or in the lunchroom while making stilted conversation with members of the tech team whose various descriptions do little to belie what it is that they actually do for eight, ten and twelve hours a day while consuming incredible amounts of caffeinated cola and often coming into work unshaven, unkempt with red-rimmed eyes.
Given it’s April in Vancouver it’s raining, so Maddy opts to wander through Pacific Centre with the hordes of other downtown workers. She stops in at Shoppers Drug Mart to pick up a Cliff Bar for lunch (the idea of eating lunch alone was too daunting given that she hasn't brought a book with her and, besides, what if Dirk sees her? Better to seek solace in a variety of women’s clothing shops).
She chews thoughtfully as she drifts in and out of clothing, jewelry and lingerie stores. She doesn’t need anything, nor is she struck with the seemingly frenetic compulsion exhibited by her peers to consume and purchase endlessly. She has her extravagances, surely, but buying a top from a store that has been picked through by every other career-woman in the immediate vicinity isn’t hers. Besides, all the clothing is the same from store to store. Currently, the downtown professional women are: a) still drawing on their winter wardrobe of crisp white shirts under dark vests with fitted, flared trousers or; b) have broken into their spring wardrobe of printed A-line skirts and wrap blouses, accented with chunky necklaces.
She hates shopping, though she recognizes she has become more fervent in her anti-shopping status in recent months. She used to enjoy going downtown on weekends with her girlfriends and making an afternoon of it, but no more. There are a lot of noble reasons she can give for not wanting to shop and purchase: she doesn’t actually need anything; she prefers to support local, independent clothiers; she feels guilty carting Banana Republic bags back to the office, past homeless people with outstretched palms and knowing eyes. And surely her reasons do encompass all of these things, but somehow it is more than that. She has been stricken with some sort of general shopping malaise. After fifteen minutes of repeatedly assuring attentive salespeople that she is just looking, she buys a Globe and Mail and sits down with a coffee in the cafeteria at Sears.
Back at the office the rest of the afternoon is relatively uneventful. Maddy calls an impromptu meeting between the heads of sales and marketing and within two minutes is able to discern that neither of them care where salespeoples’ travel expenses relating to trade shows are captures since salespeople are commissioned on sales, and the head of marketing receives bonuses based on the overall profitability of the company as a whole.
Maddy recommends to Dirk that sales travel expenses be coded to marketing because she knows Dirk will oppose her idea as a matter of principal, and she wants them to be coded to sales because it’s easier for her. Dirk does not let her down.
She pulls on her coat at 5pm and catches the bus home.
* * *
Jonathan isn’t home when she arrives, which is pretty typical these days. The architects for whom he works have a pressing deadline to meet and it is with increasing frequency that he is coming home at 8 or 9pm at night.
Recently, Maddy jokingly suggested that he wasn’t in fact working, but was actually having an affair. Jonathan replied, “I’m too tired to have an affair,” which Maddy laughed at at first, but then began to mull over at random times. He hadn’t laughed when he had said it.
She likes to think – after being with Jonathan for close to five years – that she would know if he was cheating on her. She knows, also, that everyone assumes they would be able to deduce their partner’s infidelities. Furthermore, a couple of acquaintances of hers have been subjected to philandering significant others and both had been caught totally unaware.
But, like her mother intones, “If you don’t trust someone, what’s the point of being with them?” and so Maddy doesn’t believe that Jonathan is having an affair. Besides, with the exception of the middle-aged receptionist and a mousy CAD technician, Jonathan works with men. This is, assuming, that Jonathan isn’t sexually attracted to men.
She muses idly as she assembles dinner (she’s a horrific cook so she prefers to assemble things such as pasta and sauce, spinach salad and chicken breasts) what she would do if she ever found out that Jonathan was cheating on her. She decides that, after getting over her initial shock and surprise, she will have to meet this other woman. Jonathon doesn’t take intimacy lightly. In fact, even though he is eight years her senior she has had almost twice as many sexual partners as he. So it would be likely that if Jonathan did have an affair, that affair would be born out of something greater than lust: it would be a mutual understanding and appreciation of someone. Someone other than Maddy. It would be gentle and kind. If Jonathan ever slept with another woman that would be the woman he would leave Maddy for.
Maddy now feels slightly depressed as she strains the spaghetti noodles, as though Jonathan has already cheated. She tends towards worst-case scenarios which never materialize. She is adept at them.
Trying to shake off such depressing thoughts she turns on her stereo and listens to some Buena Vista Social Club. She pours herself a glass of wine as she sautés some prawns with garlic and olive oil.
She doesn’t stop to consider what – theoretically – Jonathan might do if the roles were reverse and it was he that caught her cheating. No need to ponder that, just yet.
* * *
Jonathan comes home at 8:30. She sees that he is trying to remain upbeat, though he is exhausted. He thanks her for dinner, lavishes praise on her even though her meal was bland and, as usual, not at all how she imagined it would be.
He says apologetically that he’s going for a run: he’s getting stiff from sitting at his desk for such long hours and she can see the tension in his back and shoulders by the way he moves. He invites her to come along, knowing she won’t. Knowing she goes to bed around 10 or 11pm. And she does refuse, politely, and tells him to enjoy his run and that she’ll probably be in bed by the time he returns.
She knows she could do a better job of hiding the hurt in her eyes, the feeling of rejection in her voice. Jonathan is tired and stressed and the last thing he needs is a reproachful girlfriend demanding consolation and reassurance from him. She tries to empathize, tries to put herself in his shoes after a long, frustrating day at work. How much would she have to give?
She gets up and starts to clear the table, stack up the plates for washing and he immediately pitches in. Maddy can tell by his movements that he’s wary of her, knows that she’s feeling a bit rebuffed.
After the dishes are cleared, the leftovers safely stowed he takes her hands in his as she reaches to turn on the sink faucet. “I’ll do it Maddy, okay?” he asks imploringly.
She starts to object but he interrupts her. “I’ll do them when I get back. Thanks for a great dinner,” he tells her, earnestly, insistently. He kisses her, hard, on her mouth and then goes to put his shoes on. She watches him pull on his hat, affix a blinking light since it’s now dark out, pull on a windbreaker and then leave the apartment.
When she sees him emerge on the street below she returns to the kitchen and commences doing the dishes. He’s tired: he shouldn’t have to do them today. Besides, she’ll probably be in bed when he returns and she doesn’t want him crashing around the kitchen, waking her up.
2 comments:
Good story, where's it headed?
That's a fine question. One never knows. Ultimately I give up on the story at hand and then have to kill off the characters vis a vis a tiger that has escaped from the local zoo.
No deux ex machina for these bastards.
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