B as in Beauty

by Alberto Ferreras

  “I found very interesting stuff. If you give me another day to work on it, I could write some bullet points for the meeting…” I offered courteously, pointing at my paper mess.

  “No. I want to see it myself,” she cut me off.

  “Would you like me to organize them a little, and maybe go through them with you so I can explain…?”

  “I’m busy now. Just leave them over there.”

  Yeah, she was busy. She was busy gulping a poppy-seed bagel with scallion cream cheese. And the bitch doesn’t even get fat. We should call her Bony instead of Bonnie, as a tribute to her flat and narrow ass. She made me stay past midnight the night before because it was “urgent,” but now eating her bagel was more important than looking at my work. I pulled down the back of my blazer in a vague attempt to cover my generous and semi-naked butt, and silently left her office.

  On the way back to my cubicle, I decided to stop at the kitchen to get a coffee. Of course, I ran into Dan Callahan. When it rains it pours. Here I have to make a sad parenthesis to explain who Dan Callahan is.

  Dan is not physically disgusting, but he is way far from being good-looking. Half Irish—I don’t know about the other half—with black, thinning hair, greasy complexion, virtually no upper lip, and a couple of inches shorter than me, he’s not exactly what I would call a knight in shining armor. He’s like a cross between Jack Black and Rick Moranis. And he’s the last guy who asked me out on a date.

  It happened about three weeks earlier. Was I interested in him? Not really, but—hell—when you don’t have a lot to choose from, you just go for anything. In any case, Dan asked me out probably thinking that I would be an easy lay, and—why deny it—at that time I was. After months and months of not having one man approach me with a romantic interest, I would have dated Quasimodo.

  Unfortunately, the night of our date Dan got so drunk that when we finally got to my apartment he vomited all over my—real—Persian carpet.

  You would think that, after such a first date, I would never talk to the guy again. But I’m a very understanding person. I give everybody the benefit of the doubt.

  Who knows? I thought to myself. Maybe he drank on an empty stomach. Maybe he is hypersensitive to alcohol. Maybe he liked me so much that he had an extra drink to gather the courage to make the first move.

  So, when I saw him shit-faced and half covered in vomit, I did what any decent woman would do: I cleaned him up, took him downstairs, and hailed a cab for him. I called him for the next two days, trying to find out how he was doing, but the bastard didn’t even have the courtesy to return my phone calls. As a matter of fact, I suspected that he had been avoiding me in the office for the last three weeks.

  Back to the kitchen. I could have kept walking and ignored him for the rest of my life, but something—I don’t know what—made me step into the pantry to say hi. Actually, it doesn’t really matter why I said hi—the point is that I did it. Dan was talking to Mark Davenport, a new account executive from England, who had made Dan his office buddy. Mark gave him a funny look and left as soon as he saw me stepping into the kitchen. I suppose that my reputation preceded me.

  “Hi, Dan!” I said.

  He stiffened up when he heard my voice.

  “Hey, B!”

  He barely made eye contact with me, maybe hoping I wouldn’t stay. But I like a challenge: if he was going to ditch me, he better do it in person. With Mark Davenport gone, it was easier to corner him, so I blocked the exit. Dan started fumbling with the sugar and the coffee. Faking the laborious attitude of an alchemist, he started adding a little bit more sugar, a touch of milk, and then a little bit more coffee again, as if getting that coffee right was vital to the preservation of the human race.

  “I called you a couple of times on your cell, but I couldn’t get through,” I said.

  “Oh…yeah, my battery died…”

  Oh sure! His battery was dead for three weeks. The nerve.

  “Well, I just wanted to make sure that you arrived home okay,” I said. “The other night, you were a little…” There was no need to say “drunk,” we both knew it. “…but I had a great time,” I finished, with my voice going up an octave.

  “Cool,” he said. “Cool.”

  God forbid he should say, “Thanks, B, I had a great time too.” At this point I just wanted to torture him, so I brought back some of our fondest memories.

  “I was able to clean up the…” There was no need to say “vomit,” we both knew it. “You can hardly see the stain,” I added.

  “Cool,” he said, one more time. “Well…listen, I gotta run, so…I’ll catch up with you…I don’t know, at some point, okay?”

  Yeah, at some point. In my next reincarnation, maybe. He walked out, but I didn’t say goodbye to him. I had said enough.

  Anyway, here’s the part about myself that baffles me: Dan is not good-looking, he treated me like crap, he ruined my rug, which I literally carried on my shoulder all the way from Istanbul. But in spite of all that, when he rejected me, it hurt. It hurt like a punch in the gut. So I bit my lower lip, served myself a cup of coffee, tried not to cry—which was exactly what I felt like doing—and went back to my desk to deal with my ripped pants.

  I picked needle and thread from my second drawer, where I keep my office survival kit (Band-Aids, nail polish, tampons, etc.), and walked into the empty bathroom. I locked myself up in one of the stalls and proceeded with the complicated task of removing my pants in the confined space. I sat on the toilet, propped my legs against the door, and started sewing.

  A few seconds later, I heard two women walking in: Bonnie and Christine. Every morning after breakfast they came to remove traces of cream cheese and poppy seeds from their teeth and to retouch their makeup. As I sat there quietly sewing, virtually invisible with my feet up against the wall, I couldn’t help eavesdropping.

  “Did you see that memo from Operations?” asked Christine.

  “I don’t even open their e-mails anymore. What a bunch of assholes,” Bonnie replied.

  The restroom probably wasn’t the best place to discuss business, but since they couldn’t see me, they likely thought that there was nothing to worry about.

  “So who’s getting the director’s job?” asked Christine, referring to the creative-director position I was applying for. “Have you talked to Kevin about it?” she added. Kevin, or, as he’s often called, the Chicago Boss, is the president and founder of the agency.

  “It’s between Laura, and Ed Griffith. I still have to meet with Kevin, but just as a courtesy, because he’s going to do whatever I say,” was Bonnie’s reply.

  Great. I was out of the race. And her strong candidates were Laura, who comes from Account Management—no creative background whatsoever—and Ed Griffith, who has worked in every agency in the city, but never longer than six months, because he gets fired every time. Awesome choices. Naturally, the breaking news bothered me, but I had no time to grieve, because, before I could give another stitch to my pants, I heard something even more disturbing.

  “How about B? She’s a bit of a workhorse, isn’t she?” said Christine.

  Wow! Christine taking my side? Praising my work? Acknowledging my efforts? She made me feel a little guilty for all the times I’d referred to her as “the bitch’s bitch.” But Bonnie helped me snap out of my guilt.

  “B? No way! That position is too visible, too ‘hands-on’ with the client. She doesn’t have the skills, and doesn’t have the look either. She’s too fat! I can’t send someone like B to have lunch with a client. She’ll spoil his appetite!”

  Then they laughed. They fucking laughed.

  “I mean, it’s okay to have B locked in the dungeon doing her work, but…B? Director? I’m sorry, but I just don’t see her in a window office.”

  There went my dream of having an office that overlooks Central Park—along with any hope to move up in this company. I was so devastated that I felt physically weak, so I gripped the toilet-paper holder for support, acci
dentally dropping a spare roll that the cleaning lady always leaves in the stall. I saw Bonnie’s shadow move, as she looked for potential eavesdroppers. I guess she checked for legs under the partitions, but since mine were propped against the door she couldn’t see anything—thank God.

  “We should keep it down,” said Christine.

  “Nah! Who cares? What are they going to do if they hear me? Fire me?”

  And they laughed again.

  Convinced that none of their indiscretions were falling on unwanted ears, they made a few more nasty remarks about other employees until Bonnie finally said, “Okay, showtime!”—hinting to Christine that it was time to go back to work and continue faking it.

  Bitches.

  They left the bathroom, but I stayed there for what felt like an eternity. I was weeping and sewing, sewing and weeping. She’s too fat! I can’t send someone like B to have lunch with a client. She’ll spoil his appetite! I kept repeating Bonnie’s words in my mind, and my tears kept flowing, burning my face on their path. Tears of joy are refreshing, but tears of pain and anger are different: they’re bitter, and feverish. They burn like acid on your cheeks.

  “Okay, bitch,” I said to myself, as if I were talking to Bonnie, “as soon as I’m done crying my eyes out, you’ll see who I really am.” I just said this to say something, because at the time I had no idea how I could get back at her without just shooting her in the head with a rifle and spending the rest of my life in jail. It sounded tempting, but—who am I kidding?—I can’t even kill a fly without feeling guilty.

  I dragged myself back to my desk before people started thinking that I had drowned in the toilet. That’s when Lillian, my beloved and loyal Lillian, decided to come in and tell me everything about her extended weekend.

  Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  CHAPTER 2

  Wanna see some pictures of the Hamptons?” Lillian asked me at the worst possible moment.

  Okay, at this point I have to make a parenthesis.

  When Lillian came by my desk, my eyes were still red from crying, my hands were still shaking, and my makeup was a mess. But Lillian didn’t notice a thing. She wanted to show me the pictures of her weekend and tell me her adventures in the Hamptons—so even if I was covered in blood, with a steak knife sticking out of my back, she would have pursued her agenda without wondering if I was in the mood to hear her story or not. That’s Lillian. She’s got a good heart—that’s why we’re friends—but when she’s in her self-centered mode, the world can be coming to an end, and her main concern will be “What will I wear when the world ends?” Nice and generous and lovely as she is, she’s the kind of person who would say shit like “They have no bread? Well, then, maybe they should eat cake!” She is clueless. She is beautiful, generous, and well intentioned, but totally clueless on the struggles of other people’s lives.

  It is in moments like these that I wish I were an alcoholic, not because I’d like to drink myself to oblivion, but because if I were an alcoholic I could go to AA meetings, and I would have a sponsor who could help me deal with the hardships of my life. I learned about the joys of Alcoholics Anonymous with an ex-boyfriend who used to go to meetings every single day. I’ll protect his anonymity—very important—by just calling him “my AA-ex.”

  My AA-ex was a sweet guy who’d been to hell and back because of his drinking, but he was now committed to staying sober for the rest of his life. Thanks to AA, not only had he stopped drinking, but he also became a more mature and serene person.

  One of the most helpful things about the program was that every time something made him feel like drinking again, he would call his sponsor, which was another guy in the program, and his sponsor would talk him out of it. He tried rehab, psychotherapy, and medications, but the only thing that kept him sober was going to meetings every day.

  I wished I could have that. Some kind of support group that could pick me up when I’m down, and infuse me with strength when I’m weak. I wished I had a sponsor that I could call when I felt hopeless and ready to give up. But the closest thing I had to a sponsor was Lillian—a friend who had good intentions but an extremely short attention span.

  How could I tell her that I was trying to be rational and professional and do my job like I do every day, while my anger, self-hatred, and the feeling of being used were driving me insane? How could she talk me into acting as an adult when I just wanted to kick and scream like a child?

  That very moment, I was suffering what I’ve come to identify as the “charioteer syndrome.” To explain this I might have to go back to ancient Greece, or at least to my high-school years, when I studied ancient Greece, so bear with me for a second.

  When I was in high school, I had an art-history teacher called Grazia. She was Italian, but she married an American soldier and moved to the States. She looked very exotic to me: skinny as a rail, with a fantastic big Italian nose and jet-black hair. She knew so much about the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Renaissance, and the Impressionists—and she talked so comfortably about all of them—that I was convinced that the golden bracelets she wore had been extracted from Nefertiti’s grave. I learned more from Grazia than from all my other teachers, or even from the books I read in college. This woman was a genius, and she managed not only to know, but also to explain things in a way that made learning enjoyable and fascinating. If all my other teachers had been like her, I could probably put a rocket on Jupiter.

  One of the things that she explained to me, which I will never forget, was how the ancient Greeks conceptualized life. The Greeks saw one’s life as a chariot pulled by two horses: one horse represented “reason,” and the other one “passion.” According to the Greeks, if you allowed either horse to pull too hard, your chariot would flip over and you would die. That’s why everything had to be kept on balance: a little of this and a little of that.

  It’s easy to see how the “passion” horse can screw you over. Just think of the stories in the newspapers: wives who kill their husbands, husbands who kill their wives, politicians who ruin their reputations for a torrid love affair, celebrities who kick paparazzi in the face when their picture has been taken outside a strip joint. In each and every case there was a passion horse that pulled way too hard, causing people to flip and suffer the consequences.

  What we don’t see right away is how the reason horse can screw us as well, but there are plenty of good examples. The ruthless business decisions that destroy people’s lives are often excused as rational. The most obvious example is the typical executive who, instead of spending the money in a pricey system of refuse processing, prefers to save a few bucks by dumping his toxic waste in a river. If you happen to be swimming that day—well, good luck.

  I see people on TV all the time explaining the most inhumane behavior with a bunch of dollar figures. We pile up money as if we were going to be able to take it with us to the grave. Just like the Egyptian pharaohs, we want to stuff our mausoleums with gold, jewels, and honors that are not going to come with us to the other side.

  I felt that in my office we had allowed the reason horse to pull too hard; the atmosphere of fear and overdiligence was ruining our lives. We spent too much time at work, forget-ting the passion horse—love, relationships, and family. Talking, laughing, feeling loved and appreciated became just an afterthought, something we did only when we had a little time to spare.

  Louis—an old friend of mine—is the perfect example of someone who suffered the effects of an overactive “reason horse.” Louis was a white boy who worked on Wall Street, and he was dating a sweet Puerto Rican girl who worked at the Gap. Louis, who already had an awesome job and a fantastic apartment, cold-bloodedly decided that he deserved a better girlfriend, someone who could help him reach up to the next social and professional level. The Puerto Rican girl simply wasn’t enough for him. Without any explanations he dumped her, and decided to continue with his skyrocketing career to money, status, and success.

  Then, a couple of weeks
later, Louis realized a small detail: he loved his Puerto Rican Gap-working girlfriend. He realized that he truly, deeply loved her, but he didn’t see it until he lost her.

  Poor Louis spent hours and hours hanging out in front of her little apartment in Spanish Harlem, buzzing, begging, and bringing flowers, letters, and diamond rings to her. But it was too late: she never opened the door for him again.

  Louis went crazy trying to get her back. He couldn’t concentrate anymore, so he lost his job, started going to therapy, took antidepressants, and finally got all spiritual. He was the last guy I ever thought I would hear quoting Buddha and Paulo Coelho in the same sentence, but that’s what losing the love of his life turned him into. The last time I saw Louis, he was talking about previous reincarnations, meditating on the “om,” and moving to Santa Fe to become a yoga instructor.

  This is what happens when the reason horse pulls too hard. Reason can screw you just as hard as passion can.

  Sometimes I wonder if Latinos let the passion horse pull too hard but others do the same with the reason horse. As a Cuban American, I’m somewhere in the middle, and I feel the clear and constant pressure of keeping both my horses in line.

  My reason horse makes me feel smart and in control, but also empty and dead. My passion horse makes me feel volcanic and powerful, but childish and vulnerable at the same time. However, more often than not—maybe because my Cuban blood runs deep, my passion horse is the one who gets out of hand. When that happens, I cry, yell, kick, and scream.

  That particularly awful morning—as every single event seemed to push each and every one of my most reactive buttons—holding both horses on an even leash was a challenging task. It was something that could be achieved only by some Greek action hero of ancient times, and not a simple chubby girl like me. My passion horse was telling me to grab my handbag, yell a couple of expletives at Bonnie, and slam her door behind me as I left that office forever. My reason horse was telling me to keep it cool and not do anything that I could regret tomorrow. This horsy dialogue was driving me nuts.