The Balance Thing

by Margaret Dumas

“What?” I reached for a pen.

  “First, set your alarm.”

  “Totally unnecessary.”

  “Humor me.”

  I humored him.

  “Okay, now, what are you wearing?”

  “Josh! Are we going to have phone sex? That’s so cool!”

  I finally earned the heartfelt sigh I wanted. But I’m willing to bet it was accompanied by an eye roll. “Just tell me.”

  “A French maid’s uniform.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously? One of the sample Vladima T-shirts.”

  There was a pause. “Okay, that actually does more for me than the maid thing. But never mind. What’s on the bed?”

  “The laptop.” And scattered bits of colored chocolate, but I didn’t really want to tell him that.

  “Turn it off and put it on the desk.”

  “Hang on.” I put the phone down and did as he asked. I stopped for a minute to look at myself in my V-wear—a black oversized T-shirt with Vladima in full leather gear emblazoned across it. Yep, I could see why Josh would like it.

  “Okay, I’m back. Now what?”

  “Now get under the covers.”

  I complied.

  “And get comfortable. Turn on your side the way you do when you’re ready to stop talking to me and go to sleep.”

  “But I’m not ready to stop talking to you. And I’m not ready to go to sleep.” I eyed the computer with a twinge of guilt.

  “I thought you were humoring me.”

  I grumbled, but I turned.

  “Now what?”

  “Now just listen to me. I’m going to read something to you.”

  “Josh—have you started a new script?”

  Another sigh. “This is you not talking now, all right?”

  “All right. This is me not talking.”

  He started to read. It wasn’t a new Vladima script. In fact, it was just about as far to the other side of the literature spectrum as you can get.

  It was Little Women.

  I recognized it after about two sentences. “I used to love that book!”

  “I know,” he said. “You told me once. I just got you a first edition for your birthday, so be quiet and listen, and you can say ‘Thank you’ in four months.”

  “Josh!” How long ago had I even mentioned Little Women to him? How could he have remembered that? Did he think we’d still be together in four months?

  He didn’t answer me; he just read. And I listened. And it felt so nice to be lying in bed listening to that voice of his swirling around in my head. His voice and the story I knew almost by heart.

  And the next thing I knew, it was morning.

  I’ll be damned.

  Thirty-three

  >he read you to sleep?

  It was four days later and I was on my way home. Actually, I was at JFK sending instant messages to Vida from the laptop.

 
  >!!!!!!!!!

 
  >why haven’t you called?

 
  >how is stupid work?

 
  I sent it before I even thought about it. I don’t think I’d ever said anything bad about a job since I’d gotten my first college internship. Except for the Vladima thing, of course, before I’d developed an appreciation for the undead.

  Now Vida pounced on it.

  >then QUIT!

 
  >seriously!

 
  They hadn’t really. I just didn’t think I could discuss my extremely mixed feelings about my new position in the United boarding area over a wireless connection. A connection that was probably, now that I thought of it, provided by WorldWired.

  Ugh.

  It had all started out manageably enough. The ad agency—KMD—was one of the biggest in the world, and the people we’d met with had been sharp, bright professionals who had actually come up with a campaign that seemed pretty good to me. The team assigned to us consisted of two men and two women who took turns explaining the various facets of the proposed media onslaught.

  We of WorldWired met afterward in the back room of another dimly lit restaurant, this one specializing in fish and decorated with lush oil paintings of glistening trout and salmon. Not my kind of joint.

  I assumed at some point I’d get a glimpse of the WWHQ, as they referred to the company’s reportedly palatial headquarters in midtown, but apparently post-pitch reviews were traditionally held, accompanied by vast quantities of expense-account liquor, “off-campus.”

  The meeting had included more people than just those I’d met through Joe Elliot the night before. It had even included a few other women.

  “Be careful,” said one. Thalia, I think, although we hadn’t been introduced. “They can drink themselves into a stupor and boast about it the next morning, but if one of us gets a little tipsy…” She eyed my martini, then gave me a look filled with dark portent about the swift and vicious nature of office gossip.

  I paced myself.

  At some point amid the predictable posturing among the guys I’d met the first night, I must have tuned out the conversation. It was probably when one of the guys—Chip? Skip? Kip?—was droning on about targeted market areas. As if he was original or insightful or something.

  I was thinking about whether the addition of Dr. Ethan Black would be likely to increase the female Vladima fan base, when I sensed someone looking at me. Everyone, in fact, was looking at me because Joe Elliot had apparently just asked me a question.

  Were they still talking about targeted markets? I tried to keep my face neutral while my brain did a series of U-turns. In an attempt to avoid Joe’s stare, I looked up at the wall behind him. Then I said the first word that popped into my head.

  “Fish.”

  A quick check of my new boss’s expression showed he clearly expected something more of me. Can I help it if I was distracted by the portrait of a large-mouthed bass hanging over his head?

  “Fish?” I heard someone echo.

  I nodded, cleared my voice, and said as assertively as I could: “Fish where the fishing is good.”

  I looked Joe Elliot in the eye. “It’s something my Grand-pop used to say, but it sums up my thinking on targeted markets pretty well.” A complete lie, but one I was willing to commit to.

  Joe blinked rapidly, and I held my breath. Then he smiled. “I suppose you’d say we should use the right bait for the right fish as well, wouldn’t you?”

  Saved. For the rest of the evening the fishing metaphors flew, and I did my best to keep my mind on the conversation.

  This was not a good start.

  “THIS IS THE WORST BAND I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  I had to agree with Josh’s assessment. We’d met Max, Connie, Vida, and Tim at the Hotel Utah on Saturday night to hear a group called Bag O’Cats—a name that did not bode well. The band was fronted by one of Tim’s best friends, which was the only possible reason for subjecting ourselves to a truly awful performance involving guitar, bass, drum, and bagpipe (seriously).

  Immediately following the first set, Josh said something about desperately needing me to look over a clause in the contract for the movie with Fox, and we fled the joint.

  We went to his place, where—much to my surprise—he handed me the Fox contract along with a glass of Pinot.

  “I thought you were just making an excuse to get us out of there.”

  “I was, but I also want your take on this section.” He pointed to a page he’d flagged. “I’ve gone over it twenty times and I still can’t tell whether it means we need Fox to approve of our plans for Vladima at ComixCon.”

  “What?” I put the wine down and searched through the section.

  “It just has me worried because it’s so vague about exactly what kinds of things they do or don’t get to say something about,” Josh elaborated while I read.

  I glanced up at him. “It’s vague, but it’s lawye
r-vague.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they intentionally left it vague so other lawyers could interpret it in their favor if we do anything that they weren’t foresighted enough to tell us not to do in the first place.” I read over the section again in silence. When I looked over at Josh, he was rubbing his eyes.

  He saw me watching him and stopped. “What do you think we should do?”

  “You really want my opinion?” I asked.

  “Of course I want your opinion. You’re my resident genius, remember?”

  I thought about it, about a dozen what-if scenarios playing out simultaneously in my mind. “I think we need to bring them in.”

  Josh looked a little deflated. “Really?”

  I nodded, a plan taking shape. “But not to ask their permission. We’ll say that we’re doing this major event and launching the printed comic book—”

  “They’re happy about the book,” Josh interrupted. “I just never brought up the convention because…well, it never came up.”

  “It’s fine,” I told him. “We’ll call Chloe, and tell her what we’re doing, and that we’re expecting to make a huge splash at the convention, and then we’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

  “Which is?”

  “She gets the perfect venue to announce the Vladima movie.”

  Josh looked doubtful. “Will she want to announce it? So soon?”

  I picked up my glass and raised it in a toast. “She will when I get through with her.”

  I took a moment to enjoy the look on Josh’s face, then stretched and picked up the contract again.

  “Don’t do any more reading tonight.” Josh got up and stood behind me so he could rub my shoulders. “You’re exhausted. You didn’t get much sleep last night, and you really didn’t need to spend all day coaching Shayla on her Vladima performance.”

  His hands felt fabulous. Just the right amount of pressure in just the right places. “First,” I told him, “I particularly enjoyed the way I didn’t get much sleep last night—even though I still say it wasn’t necessary for you to pick me up at the airport.”

  “I’ll pick you up if I want to pick you up,” he said reasonably. “Eventually you’ll get used to it. Then we can work on me taking you to the airport.”

  “And second,” I continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “I enjoyed the day with Shayla. She’s fun to hang out with and she’s going to make a perfect booth vixen at the show.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Good. Oh, that feels good.” I leaned back a little. “Nobody at WorldWired ever gives me a backrub.”

  “That’s a relief,” Josh said. “Because I wouldn’t want to have to kill anyone.” His fingers slowed. “How are things going, anyway?”

  So I told him a fish story.

  “HOW’S YOUR OFFICE? Do you have a fabulous view of the bay?”

  It was Monday, and I was on the phone with Vida. “I don’t know,” I told her. “I’m in Dallas.”

  “Dallas?”

  “I spent the weekend at Josh’s, and when I got home this morning at six to get ready for work, there was a message on my answering machine telling me I was booked on the eight-fifteen flight to Dallas. It was just a good thing I hadn’t unpacked yet from last week.”

  “What the heck are you supposed to be doing in Dallas?”

  “Going to a series of seminars on the future of telecom. I’m on a break from one of them now.”

  “Yuck. How long do you have to be there?” Vida sounded appalled. She didn’t approve of cities that were more than a half-hour’s drive from the beach.

  “All week—but it’s not that bad. At least I’m alone out here, so I can cheat on WorldWired a little and spend time on the phone with the guys at Fox.”

  “What’s going on with Fox?”

  “An elaborate series of manipulations. You’d lose all respect for me if I told you.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Vee? I’m kidding.”

  “I know. I’m just starting to get worried about you.”

  “I’m fine,” I said automatically.

  “Did you ever get my note?”

  Note? “What—” Then I remembered. “Oh, the surfer thing.”

  “The balance thing,” she said. “You’ve only had this job two weeks and your life is totally out of balance already.”

  “It is not,” I told her. “It’s just full. And rich. It’s full and rich. And diverse.” I had a suspicion I wasn’t convincing her, so I stopped.

  “Do me a favor,” she said. “Every now and then, just to humor me, stop what you’re doing and breathe, okay?”

  “Breathe?” I was pretty sure I did that fairly regularly.

  I heard her take a slow breath, then release it. “A count of five breathing in, and a count of five breathing out.”

  I assumed this was an instruction. “Five and five. Got it.”

  “Oh, Becks.”

  We said good-bye and I went back into the seminar, where I sat in front of my laptop and completely tuned out the speaker. Was Vida right? Was I getting too wrapped up in the new job? Ever since my last layoff, all I’d wanted was to get too wrapped up in a new job. But that had been before I’d taken on Vladima. And before I’d…before…well…

  Before Josh.

  If Vida was right, I needed some sort of tool to help me keep things in balance. I feigned attention in the general direction of the speaker and opened a new file on the computer. I titled it “My Balance Sheet” and began naming the columns. WorldWired, General to-do, Vladima, and Friends. Then I wrestled with myself about the fifth column. Boyfriend. No. Backspace. Relationship. No. Backspace. Finally, I admitted the truth and simply typed Josh.

  Then I started filling it in. The WorldWired list was fairly straightforward. Show up at meetings this week in Dallas, show up in the office next week and see what they’d throw at me. That, and the items from last week’s uncompleted to-do list of research. Oh, and figure out what exactly I was supposed to be doing in this job.

  The general list would be boring things like paying bills on time and not forgetting to go to the dentist. That could wait.

  The Vladima list was potentially endless. Finalize all the ComixCon plans—that could be broken into several dozen sub-tasks. Successfully negotiate with Fox—there were probably another fifteen phone calls for that one. Then there were discussions with the printer and distributor for the comic book, and calls to about a hundred comic shops across the country to make sure they’d stock the thing when we released it.

  Yep, the V list was horrific. In fact, I realized I would be wasting valuable time just by filling in the remaining empty columns of the balance sheet.

  I looked up suddenly when the people around me burst into applause at something the speaker had just announced. Damn. I had no idea what he’d said, and to be honest I just couldn’t find it in myself to care about the future of telecom when I had a jillion-item to-do list for Vladima.

  She is one demanding vampire.

  Thirty-four

  Joe Elliot was sending me on the road. Maybe it was because, as he explained in an e-mail, I needed to visit the various far-flung branches of the WorldWired empire in order to understand the company better, or maybe it was because my new boss just wanted to get me out from underfoot. In any case, I was racking up the frequent flyer miles.

  “HOW’S ATLANTA?” Josh asked.

  “Peachy.”

  “What are you supposed to be doing there?”

  I was supposed to be learning everything there was to know about the Southeastern wireless market from the hotshot VP who owned the territory. But someone had neglected to tell Joe Elliot that said VP had just resigned. Or had Joe intended to send me on a wild goose chase? Either way, I got to the Atlanta office just in time to tag along on a lavish farewell lunch and wave bye-bye to the departing genius. I had a feeling the group would be in chaos within two weeks without him, so I made a couple of halfhearte
d recommendations, but it wasn’t worth spending my valuable phone time with Josh discussing it.

  “Never mind,” I said. “What’s happening with Fox?”

  We’d spent the weekend between Dallas and Atlanta strategizing. Well, mostly strategizing, with only a few interludes of massive sweaty sex getting in the way of our business plans. On Monday, I’d made a series of phone calls to Chloe from various airports, but Josh had had to fly to LA for the important face-to-face meeting with our executive champion on his own.

  I thought I had her convinced, and that Josh would just have to tidy up the details, because I thought I’d come up with a fairly brilliant idea. I’d told her there was going to be a monumental e-mail campaign, beginning at the grassroots level with Vladima’s most fanatical followers and growing until it reached every corner of comic fandom. By the time ComixCon came around, every attendee would have at least seen the e-mail petition, even if he hadn’t in fact signed it and passed it on to twelve unsuspecting friends.

  And what would the petition call for? What would it demand as an inalienable right?

  Why, a movie featuring Vladima, of course.

  Which would give Chloe the opportunity of swooping in for the grand finale event of ComixCon and announcing Fox’s intention to make the movie in direct response to the power of the geeky people.

  It was a bold spin on the concept of viral marketing, and I was pretty proud of it. I’d be even more proud if it worked.

  “Did she go for it?” I held my breath.

  “Not only that,” Josh told me. “But I think she wants to offer you a job.”

  When it rains, it pours. “I don’t think I could handle another.”

  “I can’t believe you can handle what you’ve already got,” he said.

  “Don’t be silly. I’m fine. Now tell me every word she said.”

  I could feel Josh’s grin. “Becks, she thinks it’s a brilliant publicity stunt and she’s totally on board. Just tell me you’re coming home so we can celebrate.”

  “I’m coming home,” I told him.

  “Good, because—”

  “On Friday.”