How I Learned to Love the Walrus

by Beth Orsoff

  "You want some coffee?" she asked. "I was about to send one of the interns on a Starbucks run."

  I yanked her inside and slammed the door shut. "The coffee can wait. Spill."

  "Well, I don’t actually know anything. It’s just a rumor."

  As if that mattered.

  She lowered her voice and continued. "You know Lindsay went up to Alaska, right?"

  "Yeah, Megan, I was there."

  "But not at the film festival."

  "No. Why? What happened at the film festival?"

  "Blake and Sheena came back to L.A., but Lindsay stayed behind."

  Apparently Blake had been telling the truth, at least about Lindsay. "Why? Did she meet someone?" How fabulous would that be if Lindsay fell for someone in Alaska? She could move there and be out of my life for good. I couldn’t help but smile.

  "That’s what I thought too, at first. But according to Christine, that’s Greg’s new assistant by the way, Rick flew up there this morning."

  My smile disappeared. "Why would Rick go to Alaska?"

  "We don’t know," she said. "And Cheryl’s not talking."

  "Did you bribe her?" You could get a lot of information out of Cheryl with the right combination of food and gossip.

  "You didn’t think that Starbucks run was for you, did you?"

  I went over the possibilities in my head while I waited for my mochaccino to arrive. Rick wouldn’t have gone to Alaska on business because we had no clients there, at least not since Blake and Sheena returned. It couldn’t be for vacation because Rick hated cold weather. Which left an affair. But if Rick and Lindsay were sleeping together, they’d be having their trysts at The Beverly Hills Peninsula, not meeting at a random hotel in Anchorage thousands of miles away. It didn’t make sense.

  I decided I couldn’t wait for the intern to arrive with Cheryl’s non-fat iced café latte and double chocolate muffin. I had to know now.

  "Walrus girl returns," Cheryl said, as soon as I knocked on the open door to Rick’s office suite. "We weren’t expecting you back until next week."

  "Slight change in plans," I said, as she stepped out from behind her desk, enveloping me in a cloud of red silk crepe and Chanel No. 5.

  "Is that why you haven’t returned any of my calls?" she asked, then let go of me to answer Rick’s phone.

  I checked my BlackBerry while she wrote down the message but it didn’t list any new missed calls.

  "I tried your satellite number," she said, as soon as she hung up.

  That explained it. "Sorry, I shut it off as soon as I had cell service again. What did you need?"

  Both of Rick’s lines started ringing simultaneously, so I settled into the black leather sofa across from her desk with my BlackBerry and last week’s Variety’s. I was still three days behind when Megan arrived with Cheryl’s muffin and coffee.

  "For you," I mouthed, and set the food down on her desk.

  She whispered a thank you and popped a chunk of double chocolate chip crust into her mouth. By the time she took off her headset, she was down to half a muffin and two swallows of iced coffee.

  "So why were you trying to reach me?" I asked.

  "It doesn’t matter anymore," she replied, and broke off another hunk of chocolate. "You want some? It’s really good."

  I shook my head. "Tell me anyway. I’m curious. You know I can keep a secret." I smiled and Cheryl smiled back, showing off a chocolate coated incisor.

  "Sydney, the muffin’s good, but it’s not that good."

  "But if you’d reached me I’d already know, so it’s not like I’m asking you to tell me anything you weren’t already planning to."

  She sucked the chocolate off her tooth with her tongue and smiled back. "I’m under strict orders."

  "I’ve got Blake gossip for you." My secret weapon. Cheryl loved him almost as much as I used to.

  "If you’re going to tell me about him and Sheena Tyler, I already know."

  Clearly she didn’t approve, which made me feel better somehow. But since I’d been out of town for so long I had no other news to share. I was reduced to squeezing my lips together in a forced pout, hoping to appeal to her maternal side. Her eldest daughter was only a few years younger than me.

  "That face stopped working on me a long time ago."

  "Isn’t there anything I can bribe you with?"

  "Sorry," she said, and shook her head. "But he’s taking the red eye home tonight."

  I had so much work to catch up on I didn’t have time to obsess about what Rick and Lindsay might or might not be doing together in Alaska. And Rick didn’t keep me in suspense when he got back. He had Cheryl summon me to his office the next morning before he’d even arrived. I’d been sitting on the black leather couch for ten minutes when he strode into the suite with Lindsay by his side. They were both dressed in summer suits but she was still carrying her trench coat over her arm, so I knew they’d come straight from the airport.

  "We have a new client," Rick said, but I couldn’t tell if he was talking to Cheryl or to me. He hadn’t yet acknowledged my presence, even though I’d jumped up the second he’d walked in the door.

  "Great," I said. "Who?"

  He motioned for me to follow him into his office. Naturally Lindsay came too. We each sat in a guest chair as Rick settled in behind his massive steel and glass desk.

  "You’re back early," he said, as he logged onto his computer.

  "Once we finished shooting, there was really no reason for me to stay." Clearly three weeks of not schmoozing had left me out of practice. I should’ve told him I left because I was dying to get back to the office.

  Rick nodded and continued typing. I stole a glance at Lindsay, but she stared straight ahead, giving nothing away.

  "So who’s the new client?" I asked again.

  "William Rush," Rick said, still scanning his e-mail.

  I’d spent yesterday evening reading all the celebrity gossip sites and back issues of Variety, so I knew he wasn’t a hot new rising star. Therefore I thought it safe to ask, "Who’s William Rush?"

  "Only the man who’s going to buy me my beach house," Rick said, finally turning around. "With his fees," he clarified, presumably in response to my obvious confusion.

  "He’s the CEO of Rush Oil," Lindsay added, in her most condescending tone.

  Unfortunately that name I knew, but I tried not to panic. Maybe William Rush had been arrested for drunk driving or soliciting a prostitute. "We’re representing him personally?"

  "Nope," Lindsay said, unable to contain her glee. "Rush Oil’s hired us for a full on publicity campaign. Print, TV, and new media."

  Ethan’s pronouncement—Rush Oil was the worst of the worst—rang in my head. "Rick, do you have any idea what this company does? What it’s already done?"

  "Yes, that’s why they hired us," Lindsay said. "They love the new slogan we pitched them. Rush Oil," she punched the words into the air with her hands, "solving America’s energy needs one gallon at a time."

  "More like killing America’s wildlife one species at a time."

  "Those geese died of natural causes," Lindsay shot back, as if I’d accused her personally of slitting their slender feathered necks. "The autopsies proved it."

  "Yeah, if you consider drowning in an oil slick a natural cause."

  "This is exactly why they need a publicity campaign," Rick said, as he abandoned his computer to join the conversation. "I’m putting Lindsay in charge, but I want you to work on it too. You just spent a month with a bunch of those crazy tree huggers, so you know how they think. That’ll be an asset."

  "First of all, I was only there for three weeks, not a month. Second of all, they’re not crazy. They’re just trying to preserve what’s left of the Arctic before it disappears."

  "See Rick, I told you she’s one of them now."

  "I am not!" I shouted at Lindsay, then turned back to Rick. "The ice really is melting. I can prove it. I’ve got video."

  "Sydney, it’s July. The ice i
s supposed to melt."

  "Not all of it. Not there. The animals need that ice to survive."

  "Let me get this straight," Lindsay said. "You think we should all pay ten dollars a gallon for gas rather than risk losing a handful of birds every now and then?"

  "It wasn’t a handful, Lindsay, it was thousands. If you think you can kill off an entire species without it affecting everything else, you’ve got rocks in your head. It’s all connected, you know." I bit my lip to keep from smiling as I remembered all the times I’d rolled my eyes at Ethan, like Lindsay was rolling her eyes at me.

  "Irrelevant," Rick said.

  "Irrelevant? You want to whitewash a company that’s destroying the planet?"

  "It’s greenwash," Lindsay said, "not whitewash."

  "And if it’s good enough for the former head of Greenpeace," Rick said, pointing his finger at me, "then it’s good enough for you."

  Chapter 58

  I was sure Rick was lying, but when I went back to my office and Googled Greenpeace and public relations, I found out he was telling the truth. I also found out there were lots of other people doing the same thing. It was a raging battle in the environmental community—the "realists" who wanted to work with the offenders in an attempt to get them to curb their worst practices, and the "radicals" who claimed the "realists" were just selling out.

  "You’re definitely a realist," Nicole said, when I called her that afternoon.

  I agreed. Still. "Don’t you think it sounds a little bit like selling out?"

  "Sydney, are you looking to get fired?"

  "Of course not!"

  "Then let it go."

  "I can’t," I said, closing the photo of Brutus that Patti and Joe had e-mailed me. "Maybe if it was just Lindsay’s project—"

  "It is Lindsay’s project," Nicole said, then parroted back to me what I’d told her five minutes before. "Lindsay met William Rush at the film festival, she recognized a golden opportunity, and she seized it. This has nothing to do with you."

  "Except Rick wants me to work on it too. He thinks spending all that time with the walrus nuts, his term, not mine, has given me some sort of insight."

  "He’s right," Nicole said. "Otherwise you wouldn’t be feeling so guilty."

  "Exactly! I can’t use what they told me against them. I don’t care how much Rush Oil is paying us in fees."

  "Can you afford to quit your job?"

  "No!" As of this morning I had $361 in my checking account, and that was only because the payment I’d sent Visa hadn’t yet cleared. I couldn’t survive more than a month without my paycheck.

  "Then you don’t have a choice."

  "You always have a choice," Jill said, when I finally reached her on her sat phone later that night.

  I knew she paid by the minute, so I got right to the point. "Then tell me what to do." I’d thought of nothing else all day and still couldn’t decide. I didn’t want to work for Rush Oil. But I didn’t want to be unemployed and homeless either.

  "I can’t tell you what to do, Sydney. This is a decision only you can make."

  "Then tell me what you would do if you were me." If Jill thought working with Rush Oil to try to get them to change their evil ways was a good idea, or at least if it was okay to work with them until I could find another job, then I wouldn’t have to feel guilty.

  "I’m not you."

  "Pretend. It’s no different than me pretending to be Darth Vader. Compared to Wilde Island, L.A. might as well be a different galaxy anyway."

  She laughed. "Okay, if I were a big time celebrity publicist who just discovered her inner environmentalist and I was forced to either work for one of the world’s worst polluting oil companies or quit my job—"

  "Which you can’t afford to do," I added.

  "Which I can’t afford to do," she agreed, "then I would try to find some sort of compromise."

  "You mean you’d work with Rush Oil and try to get them to improve like the realists say to do?"

  "Oh no, I could never work for an oil company. But that’s me," she quickly added.

  "You’re supposed to be me!"

  "I’m sorry, Sydney. Truly I am. But I can’t make this decision for you."

  "Don’t you have any advice?" The only person left to call was my mother, and I already knew what she’d tell me: You can’t quit your job until you have another, so start sending out your resume. It was the same thing she’d told me five years ago when I wanted to leave Golden State Bank.

  "Find a compromise," Jill said. "One you and your boss can both live with."

  "Which would be?"

  Then the line went dead. I redialed Jill’s satellite number over and over again, but I only succeeded in reaching the refuge’s voicemail. I was on my own.

  Inspiration struck at one a.m. This wasn’t about Rick wanting to represent an oil company, this was about money, same as it always was. All I had to do was figure out a way for the firm to make up Rush Oil’s fees in some other way. The answer came to me in a flash. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it sooner.

  I arrived at the office at eight and ran into Cheryl in the lobby.

  "Isn’t this a little early for you?" she said, looking at her watch.

  "I need to talk to Rick," I said, and pushed the elevator button even though it was already lit.

  "Sydney, you know he doesn’t take meetings before ten."

  "Yes, and I also know he gets in early sometimes to work undisturbed." I’d seen his car in the parking garage so I knew he was already in the building.

  "Undisturbed, being the key," she said as the elevator doors opened and we both stepped inside.

  I punched the button for the fifth floor and started begging.

  "You know I can’t," she said, as the doors opened and we both stepped out.

  I followed her down the hallway to the left even though my office was to the right. "I swear, Cheryl, if you do this for me I will never ask you for another favor as long as I live."

  She let out a laugh. "You have a bridge in Brooklyn you’d like to sell me too?"

  I smiled for the first time since I’d heard the name Rush Oil again. "Okay, forget that. I really, really need you to do this for me. It’s a matter of life and death."

  "Whose?" she asked, as she unlocked the door to Rick’s suite. His inner office door was shut but I could hear him talking on the phone.

  "Mine."

  She shook her head.

  "Please, Cheryl," I said, getting down on my knees in what was beginning to feel like a habit. "I’m begging."

  Her reaction was nicer than Ethan’s. She grabbed me by the arm and yanked me to my feet. "Get a hold of yourself. Do you want him to see you like this?"

  "Then you’ll get me in?" I said, plucking carpet fuzz off my knees.

  "Five minutes," she said. "After ten o’clock."

  "As long as it’s before noon." That’s when Lindsay had scheduled our first conference call with Rush Oil’s marketing team.

  I was only fifteen seconds into my pitch for BB&L’s new practice group focusing on celebrities and their causes when Rick cut me off. "Is this a joke?"

  "No," I said and reached for my laptop, which I’d placed on his desk with the screen facing him. I’d worked all night creating tables, graphs, and a five-color pie chart highlighting the different philanthropic areas BB&L could focus on, but I figured he’d respond best to the diagram displaying projected revenue growth. "Rick, I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but I absolutely believe we can make up the lost fees from Rush Oil within six months. Sooner if the walrus video goes viral. And that’s a conservative estimate," I said, pointing to the first bar on the screen. "We might even make more."

  He laughed and called out to Cheryl, who appeared in his doorway seconds later. "Do you need me for something?"

  "Did you put her up to this?" Rick asked.

  "No, she did not put me up to this," I replied, as I ushered Cheryl out and shut the door. "Now where were we?"

 
He took his feet off his desk for the first time that morning. "This really isn’t a joke?"

  "Rick, representing Rush Oil would be a huge mistake, especially since we can make up the fees in other ways. Better ways. Ways that will bring in more clients instead of losing us existing ones." That was my fourth talking point. Some of BB&L’s clients already were actively involved with environmental causes. Surely they wouldn’t be happy if we started representing the world’s worst oil company, even if Lindsay was successful in positioning them as ‘the environmentally friendly energy company of the future.’"

  He slammed my laptop shut and tossed it at me as if it were a Frisbee. "Get out of my office."

  "Rick—"

  "I’ve been more than patient with you, Sydney. You wanted to make a documentary, I let you make a documentary. You wanted to go to Alaska for a month, I said okay. But this—" he threw up his arms—" I don’t even know what this is."

  "If you’ll just—"

  "And I don’t care," he said. "I just want it to end. Now."

  I wasn’t sure how I’d gone from pitching a new practice group to defending my job in the space of thirty seconds but somehow it happened. I swallowed hard. I could feel my lower lip quivering, but I managed to keep my voice steady. "What exactly are you saying?"

  "I’m saying you get on that fucking conference call with Lindsay, and you start sucking up like you’ve never sucked up before. Here’s a tip for you. If you can still see daylight, then you know you don’t have your head far enough up their asses."

  I felt the sweat soaking right through my shirt and onto my suit jacket, but I tried to at least remain outwardly calm. "What if I said I couldn’t?"

  "I don’t think that’s something you want to say."

  Of course I didn’t want to say it. I liked being able to buy food and have a roof over my head. "But if I had to? If I told you I couldn’t in good conscience work for an oil company, especially not that oil company?"

  "Then I would tell you and your conscience to get the fuck out."

  I didn’t know what to do. I had no Plan B. "Can I have a little time to think about it?"