Stevie had me dolled up in my new Diane von Furstenberg dress. He had also taken me to MAC after work to apply my makeup, as per Savannah’s advice. I had never put this much care and attention into my appearance but it was admittedly exhilarating. As I stood with Stevie by the bar sipping a glass of Pinot Grigio, I felt like a veritable vixen. Across the bar, Chloe’s jealousy was burning through her retinas as she shot me cut-eye. Heidi did a double take, as if she did not recognize me in fashionable clothes. Jasmine Tit stood up straighter, if that was possible. I smiled, as vixens do.
“So, how is Savannah?” Stevie questioned. I was avoiding her, lest she kill my vixen mojo. I saw her talking and laughing with colleagues, champagne flute in hand, and looking phony.
“I think she gets angry when she’s sober,” I answered. “And what’s with the hair?”
“I think her hair is very fashion forward. It becomes her,” Stevie disagreed.
Oompa Loompa approached Stevie and me. “Veronica, you look lovely tonight! As do you, Stevie.”
“Hi, Etienne. What a fantastic night! We were just discussing Veronica’s wonderful new assignment,” Stevie lied, smooth like butter.
“Of course, of course, wonderful news. Stevie, may I borrow your girlfriend for a moment?” Oompa Loompa led me across the room. “Come, I would like you to meet Caden, the Vice President of GiGi. In addition to your duties on Savannah’s portfolio, you will also temporarily report into Caden for the Gi-Spot party.”
We stopped in front of a startlingly handsome man and, never having been in the presence of the most beautiful man in the world, I was instantly a hot mess.
“Caden, this is Veronica,” Oompa Loompa introduced us, which was fortunate because I had temporarily forgotten my name. “She will be managing the Gi-Spot launch party.” Caden shook my hand and I think I may have whimpered.
“Great to have you on the team, Veronica.” Caden smiled and I swooned, no longer a vixen, but a fair maiden.
“Great…you,” I managed to croak in a feeble attempt to prove to Caden that I was not mute. My mouth was dehydrated and my vixen mojo had evaporated. I suddenly realized that my hands were quite large and flabby. I panicked, not knowing where to hide them. I excused myself before I lost control of my bodily functions and somehow made it back to Stevie. He was talking to Mateo who was sporting a black shirt unnecessarily unbuttoned to display his sparse chest hair.
“I think I need a shot of Jägermeister,” I said to Stevie, still bewildered from the encounter.
“Oh, you must have met Caden,” Stevie guessed correctly. “I’ll be right back.” And he unwisely left me unattended with Mateo.
“Veronica, you look hot!” Mateo salivated.
“Are my hands large and flabby?” I asked, deeply concerned of my recent discovery.
“No babe, you’re perfectly proportioned, like a Barbie doll.” He grabbed my hand and twirled me around.
I snapped out of my stupor upon Mateo’s grimy touch. I looked around for Purell and saw Caden looking at me from across the room with amusement. My heart started beating irregularly and my breathing became laboured. He’s laughing at my hands! I had the strong urge to run towards him in slow motion and make him love my hands. But instead I ran towards Stevie who was returning with water.
“Don’t leave me alone with Mateo!” I hissed as I clutched weakly at Stevie’s arm with my man-hands.
“Who? Matthew? He’s harmless.” I was beginning to think that Stevie was a very bad judge of character.
“Stevie, please be honest with me. Are my hands abnormally large?” I asked, desperate.
“What? No, you’re hands are perfectly normal. What’s wrong with you? You’re all flushed and hysterical. Are you coming down with a fever? Here, drink some water.” He replaced my wine glass, miraculously still in hand, with a bottle of water.
I hastily drank half the bottle in one swig. “Whoa, I was thirsty.”
“Ronnie, you’re cut off. Do you want me to call you a cab?”
“Is Caden single?” I whispered.
“Caden is your boss,” Stevie grabbed my shoulders and looked me in the eyes. “You need to pull it together.”
“You’re right, you’re right.” I assented, nodding vigourously. “Am I out of my mind? Crazy! Cuckoo!”
“Yes, you are.” Stevie agreed and carefully took my arm to lead me to the coat room.
I disobediently scanned the room for Caden and saw Chloe laughing in an exaggerated manner with him. I was overcome with unnaturally strong feelings of possession and jealousy. My eyes narrowed. How can she conduct herself in his presence in such a normal manner? Now confident in the normality of my hands, I vowed that I would be exceedingly normal around Caden, putting Chloe’s normal to shame.
And with that, the Gi-Spot launch party became even more important to my advancement. Not only was this going to facilitate my transfer to New York but it would also put me in Caden’s good graces. After all, he was only going to be my boss until I threw the most awesome party in the world.
Chapter 5: Nightmare
That night I had a nightmare. I am lost, walking aimlessly through Gisele’s sterile cubicle maze, looking for my cubicle. Everyone is staring at me in horror and disgust. I’m wearing my MC Hammer harem pants and my face is covered with red lego-like acne. “Don’t hate me because I’m ugly,” I plead. “Love me.” Stevie appears and tries to spritz me with a dream in a bottle but it smells like cow poo. He cannot stand the smell of ugly and slinks away in defeat. “Come back, gay boyfriend,” I cry out but he is gone. “My boyfriend isn’t gay,” Jasmine Tit declares as she appears before me and then instantly disappears.
I enter a boardroom covered in mirrors. The mirrors are distorted, like a crazy house of mirrors at a circus or a bikini change room. Klaus is sitting at the end of a long table that looks like a runway, with Caden and Oompa Loompa on either side of him. Klaus is dressed in military gear. Oompa Loompa is in a jester outfit and is looking at me through a monocle. Caden is dressed like a cowboy from the Wild West. They have long handlebar mustaches that they are twirling with their fingers. They are laughing, the kind of evil madman laughter that one makes when one takes over the world with makeup.
I see my acne-covered face, contorted and reflected, in a million mirrors and I scream in agony. “Noooooooo! I’m uuuuglyyyyyyy!”
“Get out of here,” they are yelling at me. “You’re so ugly you’ll break the mirrors.” I turn to run but I can’t find the doors. The mirrors start to break and cave in on us. “Off with her head, off with her head!” Klaus yells.
I woke up sweating. I looked in the mirror and breathed a sigh of relief. Not a blemish on my face.
After memorizing encyclopedic volumes of information on Gisele’s Lip & Nail segment for the last few weeks, Savannah decided that I’d be better placed with Sydney in Gisele Eye as there are more new product launches to plan in Eye than Lip & Nail. Plus, Gisele Lip & Nail were still selling like crazy, riding the wave of the Forbidden Fruit campaign.
I joined Sydney in preparing for the dreaded Marketing Review which was to take place in a mere seven days. Savannah thought it would be a great learning experience for me to present. The Marketing Review was the proverbial throwing of the sacrificial virgins into the fire, or the chance for the junior marketers to cut their teeth presenting to Gisele executives.
“What kind of questions do they ask you?” I asked Sydney. I was starting to get worried.
“Anything.” Sydney answered. “Just don’t say that you don’t know. That’s like saying ‘please fire me’.”
“But how do you remember everything?”
Sydney handed me a huge binder with about fifty tab dividers. “The Eye Bible. Don’t dare enter a boardroom without it. We update it every month. Your turn.”
Unlike Heidi, Sydney was generous with sharing, or giving me, work. I didn’t know how I would possibly find time to get up to speed on the Gisele Eye business, update the Eye Bible and h
elp Sydney with the presentation because I was also invited to any meeting to do with Gisele Eye. Since I was new, I participated in countless meetings as if I were a fly on the wall. From this vantage point, these meetings seemed to really get in the way of getting things done. People would spin like whirling dervishes over every detail until dizzy with deliberation.
My days were caught up in the whirl of these meetings and I found myself only starting to get any work done at 5 pm, just when Sydney was leaving. Sydney was happy to completely offload the presentation on me. I could see now why Heidi was bitter.
The Marketing Review presentation had a template that we updated manually every couple of months. This template was designed by a sadist to be a painstakingly laborious and time-consuming exercise of analysis paralysis. The rest of the presentation was a dog and pony show. To that end, we clogged up our computer servers trying to make the presentations look pretty with lots of images and embedded videos.
The other particularly unpleasant part of the presentation prep was Savannah’s reviews. She seemed to derive pleasure in ripping apart the fruits of my labour, her scribbled revisions cutting through the page like insults. The last round of review by Savannah was meticulous word-smithing and layout editing, another curious method of wasting time and energy.
Although I had worked almost every waking hour to learn the business and prepare a monumental presentation in less than two weeks, I was a nervous mess on the day of the presentation. As per Stevie’s counsel, my hair was pulled back into a low and loose chignon. I was dressed in a simple black dress and short-sleeved cream blazer from Banana Republic that I purchased with Stevie’s approval after convincing him, in protection of my credit card balance, that I did not want to invest in a Gucci suit, even if it was the Mercedes Benz of business suits. He consented even though he thought that my purchase was safe and boring, like a Volvo.
I cancelled all my morning meetings to review the presentation but was unable to concentrate due to an exceptionally nervous bladder. When I passed by Sydney’s desk on my seventh trip to the bathroom, she stopped me.
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
“Um…to the bathroom. Is that OK?”
“What? Are you crazy? You can’t leave your desk! You are the holder of the Eye Bible. If Savannah calls for information and you’re not at your desk, you are in deep shit.”
“I can’t pee? What am I supposed to do? Wear a diaper?”
“No, you just don’t drink.” Sydney answered, as if dehydrating myself was the most obvious option in the world.
“What are the chances that Savannah will call me the one minute that I go to the bathroom?”
“I would run if I were you,” Sydney advised. I paused to consider the warning then ran like the wind to the bathroom. My phone was ringing when I returned, speed walking, to my cubicle. You’re kidding. Panicked, I grabbed for the phone.
“It’s Sydney. Savannah called. They’re running an hour late so they’re going to work through lunch to stay on track. We’re on at noon. Remember, we need to go fifteen minutes early to dress the room.”
“Do you know if Savannah tried calling me?”
“Sorry, I don’t know.”
“Great.” I was now in deep shit for not peeing my pants.
At quarter to noon, I arrived punctually at Sydney’s cubicle with a cart full of items to dress the room but she was not there. She wasn’t waiting for me in the boardroom either. There were two boardrooms at Gisele. The presentations alternated between these two boardrooms to allow the following team to dress the room. Dressing the room was a two-person fifteen-minute minute ordeal. You had to arrange your products meticulously like shrines to the makeup gods throughout the room. You also had to overkill the room with branding – posters and banners of your portfolio’s most recent advertising around the perimeter of the room. The desired effect was as if the room vomited your brand.
Since Sydney was AWOL, I embarked on the task solo. At around five minutes to noon, as I stood admiring my work, Sydney ran into the room, uncharacteristically frantic.
“Change of room, change of room! We’re in the Mascara Boardroom! Didn’t you get my email?” I had turned off my email alert so that I didn’t get distracted. Note to self: there are three boardrooms at Gisele.
Sydney started grabbing products and wildly throwing them into the cart.
“Grab the posters and run!” She bolted out of the room with the cart.
“Wait! Where’s the Mascara boardroom?” I gathered the posters and banners and ran in the same direction as Sydney. The posters were large and cumbersome and made running down the long hall quite challenging.
“Where’s the Mascara boardroom?” I yelled blindly, the posters blocking my eyesight, to the first person I ran into. Unfortunately, it was Caden. Of course, I run into the man of my dreams just when I looked like I escaped from an insane asylum, sweating, panting, and hair astray. I was probably foaming at the mouth.
He laughed. “Let me guess? Marketing Review? The room’s just down the hall, to your right. Do you need help?”
“No, I’m fine!” I continued clamoring ungracefully down the hall. Apparently a combination of humiliation and fear-induced adrenaline gave me the ability to utter a coherent sentence in Caden’s presence. In any case, whatever it was, I’m sure it was extremely unattractive.
I arrived in the Mascara Boardroom, breathless and shaking. I dropped the posters in a heap on the ground.
“Take a deep breath! Calm down, just calm down!” Sydney yelled, frenzied. She grabbed the posters. Two of them were visibly damaged during my mad dash down the hall. “Shit, we can’t use these. Stay here. I’ll get some back-up posters. Hurry, hurry, fix the products!”
The products were disrespectfully piled on the boardroom table. The makeup gods would be insulted. I rushed maniacally around the room, throwing products around haphazardly. Sydney ran back in the room in a couple of minutes empty-handed, unable to find back-up posters. We decided unwisely to place the visibly damaged posters in the furthest corners of the room. The room looked like it was dressed by drunken sailors.
Savannah, Medusa snakes well-behaved, and the designer-suited executives started filing seriously into the room. The designer suits looked like they were angry at the oxygen in the room. Sydney motioned to me to fix my hair. As the designer suits took their seats, I tried to squeeze my loose hair back into my once sophisticated chignon. Sydney shook her head. I removed the chignon. She widened her eyes and shook her head vigorously. As I put my hair into a sloppy ponytail, I realized that I forgot the Eye Bible in the other boardroom. I mouthed the word “bible” to Sydney but she didn’t understand. Resorting to charades, I put my hands together in prayer position and looked up at the heavens. At this point, I noticed the designer suits and Savannah now seated and staring at me, unimpressed. I suddenly had the urge to pee again.
“Hi, I’m Veronica.” I greeted them awkwardly with a wave. I only recognized Klaus and Savannah but none of the designer suits bothered to return my introduction. I cleared my throat and moved to the laptop. Sydney had the presentation ready to go. However, it wasn’t going. I clicked the mouse and banged the keyboard increasingly frantically and violently.
“Just a minute,” I filled the tense air with nervous laughter. The silence from their end was palpable.
My audience was not amused. Sydney came to the front of the room with a USB key, inserted it into the laptop and opened the presentation for me. It was not what one would describe as a smooth start. Maybe I should have prayed to the IT gods instead of the makeup gods before the presentation.
I stumbled through the presentation, struggling to read the slides as if I needed glasses. Klaus interrupted me halfway through the presentation. “Why are there so many fucking slides?”
I stood open-mouthed and mute, staring back at him.
“It is so fucking long. Get to the point.”
“Um…” I looked at Savannah and Sydney for h
elp. They avoided my eyes. All the extra slides were added as per Savannah’s request. “Well… uh… we wanted to make sure that we were prepared for —”
“Bull shit,” he responded. You could say that the presentation wasn’t going so well.
He leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. “What percentage of Gisele consumers buy multiple Gisele mascara products simultaneously? For example: volumizing mascara and lengthening mascara.”
I did not think that he was open to debating whether volumizing and lengthening mascara were the same thing. My mind was blank. All I could think of to say was, ‘please don’t fire me’.
“About seventy percent,” Sydney piped up. I frowned. That didn’t seem right.
“Good. We need to get that number up to 100%. No one should be happy with just one mascara brush,” he scoffed at the ridiculousness of the notion. “We have to make women want – no – need to buy all of our mascara products. I want to see your plan to accomplish this at the next Marketing Review. Is that clear?” I nodded like his puppet, accepting the absurd challenge. The designer suits stood up and filed out of the room, leaving Sydney and me alone to clean up the mess.
“Great meeting!” Sydney looked ready to high-five me.
“Do you mean the one that just happened? Are you kidding me? It was a total shit show.” If I had made any progress on Chloe’s Tracker, this would have set me back.
“Don’t worry, you’ll learn to think on your feet.”
“You mean lie on your feet? There’s no way seventy percent of our consumers buy different Gisele mascara products at the same time!”
Sydney shrugged. “Close enough. I rounded up. You’ll learn. Can you take care of this?” she gestured around the room. “I have a meeting to run to. Thanks!”
Why I Love My Gay Boyfriend Page 4