The Cotton Queen (23 page)

“And hopefully when they’re not being forced to share the same fish fork.”

Everyone laughed. Ardith gave a meaningful look to Geoffrey, who nodded.

“We are planning, perhaps early next year, to open a second store site in Plano. The north area is just booming and we think we could get in there early and establish a good base.”

I nodded. “I would certainly like to be considered for your staff if you make that move,” I said. “Although I’m not sure that I can wait until next year to go to work.”

“Of course not,” Ardith said. “Besides, you need to learn the business from Geoffrey and myself. We’ll put you on staff here. I know it’s a long way from McKinney and with the Expressway eternally under construction the commute is horrid. So you’ll come in two or three days a week, learn a few things, make a tad of money. If nothing else, it will perk up your résumé.”

As I walked back out to my car, I felt a strange disconnect from reality. I’d found a job, doing something I might actually like and be good at. And I’d just agreed to come into Dallas two or three days a week indefinitely.

That couldn’t be good.

L
ANEY

G
ETTING
MY
first job was so exciting, it was like anticipating a great romance. I had all the thrill, butterflies, angst and enthusiasm of any love at first sight. And I felt just as certain about the prospect of a happy ending. You would have thought by my eager jitters that I’d never put in a workday in my life, when I’d actually had a longer and more varied work experience than most of my bosses. And you would have thought that all those years would have taught me to be wary of guys who seemed too good to be true.

That was my boss. Mr. Thrushing, or Larry, as he preferred me to call him, was looking for a smart, ambitious young woman to put on the fast track to executive status. He thought I was just what he was looking for. And my lack of a corporate résumé just meant, he told me, that I hadn’t learned any bad habits in what he termed “Willie Loman’s world.” Of course he was mistaking the character from
Death of a Salesman
for one in
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
but I knew what he meant. I also knew that his actual reading was limited to
Baron’s
and the
Wall Street Journal.

It was all so great. I dressed in my basic black suit, carrying my Day-Timer in my briefcase as I went to my own tiny postage stamp of an office with a little window that looked out into the branches of a big tree. My name was on the door with my fabulous title, Assistant Director For Special Projects.

Larry was the director for Special Projects. I figured out pretty quickly that was a euphemism for stuff-nobody-else-in-the-organization-wants-to-do. My boss was the cleanup man. Every situation that was prickly, icky or sticky got dumped on his desk.

I found him generally unsuited for the job. Larry was a glad-hander. He could remember people’s names and their wives’ names and whether they played golf or racquetball. He spent a great deal of company time both on the course and on the court. You could mention the latest news on some obscure business or market phenomena and he always had the low-down scoop, the most up-to-date gossip and the grimy details. I’m certain he was a true asset to the company team.

But he didn’t like his job very much, nor did he seem to appreciate its value. Almost from my first day at my desk, he delegated most of it to me.

In the beginning I felt swamped, nearly overwhelmed as dozens and dozens of tedious, thankless tasks were piled in my In-box. But I worked through that. I took each wrinkle that came my way and, one by one, I carefully ironed its problems and set them aside. I discovered that I was getting a fast and thorough education on how the actual operations of the corporation worked and where they didn’t work.

Larry was very pleased with my efforts. He heaped tons of praise on me and even got me a very quick raise in salary. I felt very safe in confiding my thoughts on how the guys in the computer center, ever bogged down and understaffed, might be able to hand off much of their in-house application education through a tandem training system.

He listened intently and encouraged me.

“Write it up,” he told me. “Write it up as a proposal and get it to me on a floppy and I’ll see what I can do.”

I spent almost two weeks putting together my research and my speculations. I was worried about my numbers, simply because they were so good. But after reworking them a dozen times in every possible mode, I felt that I’d pinned them down.

“What’s this?” Larry asked as I handed it to him one morning.

“The tandem training.”

He took the disk from my hand.

“I’ll look at it,” he said. “Polish it up a bit, if I think it needs it, and pass it on to the next level. It’s hard to be patient, but things take time.”

I nodded and I waited.

It was almost six months and several excellently written proposals later, that I finally heard. Or rather I read, in the company newsletter, that T-Training was the newest innovation in network-wide I.T. compatibility. And heading up this project was the new vice president for Information Technology, Larry Thrushing.

I confronted him only after I’d seen with my own eyes the proposal he’d submitted. It was exactly what I’d handed him on that floppy. The only polishing I detected was the change in authorship. And he didn’t even have the generosity to list me as a contributor. I was stunned. I felt that for all my hard work I’d been stabbed in the back.

Larry didn’t even blush when he gave me his explanation. “It was a good idea,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere if they thought some low-level nobody had come up with it. Without my name on it, it was dead in the water. Now, don’t worry, Laney. I’m going to continue to take care of you. I’ll still be your boss, just on a higher level.”

So Larry was promoted and Mr. Carmington was given his position. He was older, slower and less knowledgeable about virtually everything.

“You and I are going to get along fine, Lucy,” he told me.

“Laney,” I said. “My name is Laney.”

“All right, Laney,” he replied, as if he were almost annoyed at having to use my actual name instead of what he thought I was called. “That will be fine. Please remember this, maybe you should write it down...”

I grabbed a pencil and a yellow pad.

“I take my coffee with one teaspoon of sugar and a single dollop of half-and-half. Do not, under any circumstances, bring me coffee that’s been whitened up with powdered creamer. It sours on my stomach. Half-and-half is what I want. Make sure that you always have that in the break room refrigerator and that it’s fresh.”

That night when I complained to Robert, he howled with laughter.

“At least you don’t have to speculate on where his priorities lie,” he said.

“I don’t think this is funny,” I told him. “The guy doesn’t seem to know anything about anything.”

“That’s probably why Larry put him in there,” Robert said. “The old guy would just get in the way and Larry’s confident that you can handle the department on your own.”

“Then why wasn’t I even considered for the director’s job?”

Robert shook his head. “Baby, don’t get mad at me,” he said. “You’ve got to be realistic. You’re barely twenty-four years old. And you’re gorgeous. Nobody on senior staff is going to look at you and think to themselves, ‘that’s director material.’ It’s just not going to happen. You just keep working at it. You just keep exceeding the mark day after day, covering for Carmington and keeping things smooth. Eventually somebody is going to notice.”

“I don’t get a lot of satisfaction in making my boss look good,” I told him. “It’s what I’ve been doing since Aunt Maxine first put me to work. And I was a lot more willing to help Uncle Warren shine than any of the Bozos I’m currently spinning plates in the air for.”

Robert laughed again. These days he laughed about almost everything.

Unlike myself, Robert was not having to work hard and wait patiently in someone’s shadow. He was making money hand over fist. We both worked sixty to seventy hour weeks, but while mine netted me a comfortable salary, Robert got huge bonuses and stock options.

The price of oil had gone through the roof. The boom was big and with the Reagan administration cutting back on federal regulation, there were big profits to be made in the industry.

Robert worked on the finance side. Small independent oil companies who had leased prospects contracted with him to come up with investors to pay for the expense of drilling. Since nearly everybody wanted a piece of the action, working guys with their life savings and ancient old widows with their husbands’ annuities were lined up to buy in. If the well came in, everybody made money. If it didn’t, the investors lost everything, but the companies, who had so little of their own capital invested, were in a good position to lease more land elsewhere that new investors would pay to develop.

Robert was good at finding the people and selling the shares. Greg was, too. They were close colleagues and friendly competitors. Both making more money, more quickly than they’d ever imagined.

Hilary, Greg’s girlfriend, was out of the picture now. I never knew what happened to her. After my graduation party, I never saw her again. Several weeks afterward we went to a weekend gathering and he was with someone new.

“What happened to Hilary?” I’d asked Robert.

He shrugged. “They broke up,” he told me. “Greg didn’t give me any details. But he doesn’t seem to be suffering from a broken heart.”

No, he didn’t.

He was showing up with a new girl on a bimonthly basis, each one blonder and bigger breasted than the last. Greg was drinking deep and laughing long. And my Robert was, too.

One afternoon the two of them had taken off early, gone by the car dealership and both showed up at our front door in brand-new BMWs. Robert’s was fire-engine red, Greg’s was powder blue.

“I can’t believe you bought that car,” I told him later that evening. “You just went out and bought it, without even discussing it with me.”

That irked him. “Why would I discuss it with you?” he asked. “It’s
my
car. Are you going to try to tell me what I’m going to buy for myself with my own money?”

“I wouldn’t tell you what to do about anything,” I said. “But with the renovations that the architect has come up with for the house and that big vacation you’ve been talking about to the South Pacific, I thought that at least you’d want to talk about it. We’re supposed to be sharing each other’s lives.”

“We are. We are, babe,” he insisted. “Don’t be mad about the car. I know you’re worried that I bought it to pick up chicks. Well, that may be why Greg bought his, but I bought mine because I really like it. I like having a snazzy, good-looking vehicle to drive. Damn, don’t you think I’ve earned it?”

“Of course you have,” I said.

We made up. We made love. And I forgot all about it. I had just been jealous. The man I loved was more successful than me and I should be proud instead of resentful.

A couple of months later, on a gray and boring Thursday, I’d forgotten some papers that I’d been working on at home. It had been a horrendously busy week and I’d hardly seen the inside of my home, but I needed those papers. I just couldn’t do without them. So in lieu of a lunch break, I went home to get them. I was annoyed to find a Datsun 280Z taking up the space directly in front of the house, its vanity plate read Perfect 10. I rolled my eyes and found another parking spot down the street. When I walked back to the house, I was surprised to see the BMW in the driveway.

Once upstairs, I was more surprised to see one of Greg’s cast-off buxom blondes bouncing her silicone titties over my new king-size bed while she rode my Robert screaming, “Go, stud! Go! Go! Harder! Harder!”

If before that moment someone had asked me what my reaction might be to finding Robert with another woman, I’d have honestly answered that such a sight would have me bursting into tears. That’s not at all what happened.

I was calm. I was dry eyed. And I was out for revenge.

Robert’s overpriced graphite tennis racquet was leaning up against the wall next to the door. He was always just leaving it there and I’d hang it back in the closet for him. I picked it up and without bothering to remove the protective cover, I delivered a forceful forehand return directly on the sex cheerleader’s big gaping mouth.

She jumped and screamed. Her nose was bleeding. I began pounding the racquet into Robert who was scrambling to escape. I managed one direct blow to his private parts that had behaved so offensively to me. Then he was screaming, too.

I was screaming. They were screaming. I was still lobbing and backhanding. The girl had blood dripping all over her and the next blow I landed had her scurrying out of the room, down the stairs and out the front door, stark naked. Robert was half bent over, holding his jewels, trying to fend me off with one hand. He managed to wrench the racquet away from me before I did much more damage.

“Stop it! Stop it!” were the words I finally deciphered coming from his mouth.

When I finally stopped, he threw the expensive racquet across the room.

He remained bent over, cursing and complaining about his injury.

I was ready to complain about my own.

“How could you?” I asked him. “How could you,
stud?
”

That word, at least, captured Robert’s attention. He wasn’t going to be able to lie about it or weasel out of it. I’d believed my eyes and my ears.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Laney, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it. It was just so easy. It seemed so basic and simple. I never thought you’d find out. I never wanted to hurt you.”

None of his answers made me feel any better.

For two long days we wrangled over it, two long days of pleadings and recriminations. I wasn’t interested in his excuses. I was unmoved by his tearful regret. In the end, there was only one apology that seemed sincere enough for me to accept.

“Laney, let’s get married,” Robert said to me finally.

“What?” I was incredulous.

“I think all this freedom, all this not having things tied up and settled down, I think it’s not good for me,” he said. “If I’d actually vowed to be faithful, I’m sure I would have been.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I even believed him. I wanted to throw his too-little-too-late offer back into his face. But I didn’t want to lose my little house that I’d come to love. I didn’t want to admit to my mother that she was right and that I did get hurt. I didn’t want Robert to become Greg, moving happily on with his life, forgetting all about me. I think it was those reasons more than his insistent declarations of love that led me to my answer.

“All right,” I told him. “I’ll marry you. And we’ll forget that this ever happened.”