The doggy chocolates came in a gold box with a ribbon, just like expensive human chocolate and looked like real chocolates. I placed them in the kitchen and walked back to my desk, eagerly awaiting the interoffice emails criticizing the person who put doggy chocolates in the kitchen. The emails never came. A few hours later, I walked back to the kitchen, a criminal returning to the scene of the crime. The chocolates were gone. I checked the trash. The box was in there, but there were no half-chewed then spit-out chocolates to be found. People ate them without complaint. So much for creating controversy. I walked back to my desk and realized that it was now official that I work with animals. My only hope was that David ate one.
Speak of the devil. “Jenna, do you have a minute?”
“Sure thing, David.”
“Great. Have you spoken with Bob in our Alabama office about the Champions Bar case?”
“No.”
“It’s set for trial in a few months.”
“It will settle,” I said confidently.
“You still need to be prepared, and since it’s an Alabama case, Bob needs to be prepared, too. I’m not licensed to practice there.”
“We have the least amount of damages of the six co-plaintiffs, we can just tag along.”
“No, we need to be ready. Let’s go back to my office and get Bob on speaker phone now.”
David dialed Bob’s extension using speaker phone. When you call another extension at Johnson Smith, you only have to dial the extension and your initials show up on the other person’s caller ID instead of a phone number. This works between the Tampa and Alabama office as well.
The receptionist answered the phone and said, “Hello.”
I presume the receptionist answered the phone with “hello” instead of “Johnson Smith,” because she could tell, by David Greene’s initials, that another Johnson Smith employee was on the other line. David was not impressed by this greeting and asked her who she was.
“I’m the receptionist,” she replied.
“I know that,” he said, contempt oozing from his voice. “What is your name?”
The receptionist told David her name.
“Is that how you usually answer the phone?” asked David.
The receptionist was honestly confused and politely responded, “May I ask who’s calling?”
“David Green.”
She apparently did not hear him and said, “Who?”
David got angry and said, “Look at your wall!”
“Excuse me?”
“What does your wall say?” He said at a normal volume, but with an angry tone.
She replied “Johnson Smith,” very quietly, obviously confused by the conversation.
I put on my best poker face because I was about to lose it. As he often does when he becomes upset, David began unconsciously and uncontrollably rocking forward and backwards. He was obviously pissed that the wall did not include “Jones Green and Taylor.”
Instead of shouting when he gets angry, David begins whispering in a serious tone. He said, “Okay ma’am,” took a deep breath, then barely audibly said, “Could you please advise Bob Jinkins that David Greene wishes to speak with him.”
The receptionist did not even respond, opting instead to just connect David and Bob.
Bob picked up the phone. “Hello?”
David’s rocking stopped and his voice returned to normal. “Hi, Bob, it’s David and Jenna from the Tampa office. We’re calling about the Champions Bar case. It’s set for trial in a few months.”
“Isn’t that the one that’s going to settle?” Bob asked.
“Probably, but we want to be prepared just in case.” David said.
“There’s fifty other plaintiffs on that case, we’ll just sit back and collect the money.”
“That’s a good idea, Bob. We’ll call you if anything needs to be done.”
After we hung up, David said, “So do you get what you need to do?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Right, but pay attention.” David said.
“No problem,” I replied, wondering how you pay attention to nothing.
I went back to my desk and was greeted by an email to trump all emails. An attorney from our office had sent an office-wide email advising all of us that the airport line was long and to leave early if we needed to travel. In response, a secretary at our office (accidentally I presume) hit “reply all” and sent our entire office photos of her boobs and crotch. The message attached to the photos read “This is what you get when you get back.” Two seconds later, we received another email from the secretary telling us to disregard the first message. In my opinion, the retraction email serves only to draw attention to the first email, which people may have overlooked otherwise. I put this email chain in the file labeled “miscellaneous,” even though it easily trumped the other miscellaneous emails which were:
–I need Scrabble tiles. Any letters are fine, just leave them at my door.
–I need a sheep skin rug and a wooden comb tonight. (I question the word need on this email and the one prior.)
–Today is Customer Appreciation Day at McDonald’s. If you order one Big Mac, you get something, but I didn’t hear the end of the commercial. I think there’s a Quarter Pounder deal too. (In case you’re avoiding McDonald’s because it’s cost prohibitive.)
–To the person who opened my desk, removed my bag of chips and poured apple juice in it, I WILL FIND YOU. (Are you sure it’s apple juice?)
–What does an L on a report card mean? (Your kid is stupid.)
* * *
I went to a St. Patrick’s Day party at the beach at my friend Amanda’s parents’ condominium. The condo is beautiful and overlooks the water. Amanda regularly entertains there when her parents weren’t in town.
Amanda invited a guy named Max, a lawyer from her office who she had been trying to set me up with for the past few months. I avoid blind dates because, like all of my dates, they inevitably fail. The difference is that when they fail, I not only have to reject the guy, I have to find a creative way to placate the friend that went out of her way to set me up with the guy. I usually have no concrete reason I’m not interested in a guy and I hate having to articulate a reason to the friend. That being said, I agreed to meet Max at the party: first, because it wasn’t an actual date, and second, because I was now over the two year mark for not being laid, which seemed abnormal.
Max was taller than me, but shorter than I prefer. He was also a little too metrosexual for my liking, in that he had a salon haircut that almost reached his eyebrows and wore $300 designer jeans with holes in them. Nevertheless, I wound up hanging out with Max for most of the night, trying to give him a chance. As it turned out, in addition to being a lawyer, Max was a triathlete. Another black mark against Max.
While triathlons involve cycling, all but a few professional triathletes look absolutely ridiculous on a bike. A common triathlete mistake is to position the aerobars on the bike as an elbow rest at a chest high level. This tends to take the “aero” out of the aerobars. To make matters worse, triathletes use all the extra space between the two aerobars by inserting a long narrow water bottle with a straw so that they never have to move off their faux-aero position, even to drink water. My problem with triathletes is not just aesthetic however. Triathletes also generally suck at cycling since they view drafting as cheating rather than a strategic necessity. And they only ride triathlon bikes, which are not nearly as maneuverable as road bikes, making them dangerous during group rides. Fortunately, most triathletes get spit out the back of the peloton very early in a group ride so you don’t have to gaze at their goofiness for very long.
Max said nothing to change my opinion about amateur triathletes. It turned out that he regularly went to the same group rides as me, but usually got dropped during the warm-up. I could hear my mom in my head: “Jenna, he’s good-looking, rides a bike, has a good job…Triathlon? Cycling? What’s the difference? You’re going to be single the rest of your life.�
��
I decided to put aside my prejudice against metrosexual triathletes, and spent the evening imparting to Max the absolute absurdity of draft-legal triathlons, which essentially turn a triathlon into a running race. It’s like having a draft legal time trial, even though by definition, a time trial is the rider against the clock with no drafting. Max was not nearly as impassioned as I on this topic. At the end of the night, Max and I exchanged numbers.
The following weekend, he picked me up to go to “Italian Fest.” Italian Fest is an outdoor event in Ybor City where Italian restaurants give out samples of food and wine to anyone who purchases a wristband. I rode my bike from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. in order to be ready when Max came by my house at noon. While March in Florida is typically delightful, this particular day was 92 degrees with 100% humidity. Walking around the Festival was comparable to strolling along the surface of the sun. To combat the heat, I hydrated on wine throughout the afternoon. I was drunk, hot and ready for a nap by 3:00 p.m. As I was debating whether it was rude to cut the date short, I saw Ryan Smith, the Smith of Johnson Smith, in line for Pastamore Italian sausage. Because I was in an un-pregnant state, I quickly turned the other direction into the crowd and told Max we had to go home.
Ever the wine snob, Max wasn’t ready to leave until he thoroughly impressed me with his superior wine knowledge. “Let’s go to the Italian Wines of Summer table,” he said. The table was in the opposite direction of Ryan Smith, so I obliged. There were eight summer wines to sample. As he had all afternoon, Max made quite a production of twirling the wine in the glass and commenting to the vendor on the “legs.” After taking an exaggerated smell of the wine, he finally took a sip and assigned an absurd adjective to each taste, such as, “buttery,” “crisp,” or “vegetal.”
On glass number two, Ryan Smith walked towards the table so I began to walk away.
“Where are you going?” asked Max. “We have six wines left to taste.”
“I’m going to get some of that Italian water ice,” I replied.
“The slurpee stuff? Are you crazy? You’ll destroy your palate.”
I did not share his alarm as I walked towards the delicious water ice, my heart racing because of the close call.
Ryan and I work on different floors at the office and had actually only met once, on the elevator. The conversation was memorable because I stuck my hand out and said, “Hi, I’m Jenna and I work in the subrogation department. Nice to meet you,” and Ryan responded by keeping his hands at his side and said, “No it isn’t.” That was that.
Ryan is well known for his eccentricities. His suits are all pastel pinstripes, usually baby-blue or yellow. Naturally, he wears these suits with a matching top hat and snake-skin loafers. His beard and hair have the yellowish tint of a smoker and he rarely cuts or grooms either so that they sprout from his face and head like a lion’s mane. The only other bit of information I have about Ryan Smith is that he occasionally sends cryptic office-wide emails such as, “Bring a bag lunch next Tuesday to the conference room to discuss King Henry II,” or “Please see me if you have any information on Vitamin E.”
My days of socializing in public were, I realized, over until July. I couldn’t risk being caught by work people in a normal state or by my regular friends in a pregnant state. From the water ice table, I could no longer see the summer wine table where Max and Ryan were tasting wine. I relaxed and tried each of the water ice flavors, marveling at the simplicity. The mango tasted like mango, cherry like cherry and lemon like lemon. If only it were infused with alcohol. As I was tasting the grape, Max walked over, Ryan in tow. Fuck, mother-fucking fucker.
“This is my girlfriend Jenna. Jenna, this is Ryan. I just met him over by the summer wines and he is an expert.”
I was so stunned that Max introduced me as his girlfriend that I actually said, “Nice to meet you,” once again setting myself up for, “No it’s not.” I cringed, waiting for the response, but instead, Ryan replied, “Nice to meet you.” It was clear that Ryan had no clue who I was even though I had worked in his firm for nearly four years. I relaxed slightly, praying the conversation stayed on the exciting topic of aftertastes and fruit pairings and didn’t venture into the equally exciting topic of lawyering. Over the next hour, I tasted fourteen different wines with Ryan and Max. The alcohol helped calm me and divert my attention from the fear of seeing Ryan on Monday, suddenly six months pregnant.
Ryan finished his last wine and walked away without saying goodbye. I wasn’t surprised or disappointed by this behavior, though Max was clearly stung by his abruptness. Max drove me home and asked if he could come up and watch some of my Family Guy DVDs, which he had admired when he picked me up. I told him that I had a big fat nap in my future and there was no way I could watch Family Guy.
“You can sleep while I watch it,” he offered.
I thought about just loaning him the DVD, but I was quite sure I wouldn’t be having a second date with Max. It’s often hard to reclaim your property after rejecting a suitor’s advances, so I decided against a loaner. Instead, I invited him inside and made a beeline for my bed and shut the door behind me. I didn’t assist him in fending off Sonny’s humping, nor did I help him set up the DVD player.
I was in a deep sleep when I became aware of a weird sensation. I roused briefly but kept sleeping. I felt it again. I opened my eyes and realized that Max had come into my bedroom, lifted my skirt, and was going down on me while I slept. Oddly, my gut reaction was to be paranoid about the appearance and odor of my vagina, since I was walking around sweating in the sun all day and using public port-o-johns with no toilet paper. I immediately wished I had taken a European shower prior to my nap.
My next reaction, which was more sane, was that I was being violated. I very calmly said, “I’m pretty sure this is rape.”
Max immediately stopped, pushed my skirt down, and said, “I didn’t force you to do anything.”
“You’re a gentle rapist, but a rapist nonetheless,” I replied.
“You’re crazy. You invited me in.”
“That’s a novel defense to rape, ‘Your Honor, she was asking for it, she let me in to watch Family Guy.’”
“Stop saying the word ‘rape.’ It’s very dramatic. I think I better just go home.”
“That’s a great idea.”
I locked the door behind him, then slept until the next morning.
Chapter Six
On Monday, I was insanely jittery. I walked the halls like a secret agent; not turning any corners until I poked my head around to ensure that Ryan Smith wasn’t walking toward me. Though I had run into Ryan only twice in the past four years, I became obsessed with how to avoid him. Every trip to the bathroom, kitchen or parking garage became a stealth mission. To do this, I had to start taking the direct route out of my office, even though it forced me to go by Valerie Bell’s cubicle. Valerie’s daughter is about six years old and into cheerleading, dance and gymnastics. Valerie’s screensaver is a picture of her daughter in one of those midriff-baring cheerleading outfits, doing a split in the air. The kid is beauty-queen tan, with a full face of makeup, body glitter and her bloomers staring you in the face. The three pictures on Valerie’s desk are equally creepy and inappropriate: the kid in a string bikini sunning herself at the beach; posing seductively in a sequined leotard; and playing dress-up in a skin-tight cocktail dress. Because of the gentle rapist, I’d have to take the pedophilia route to the bathroom for the next three months.
Of course, now that I was intent on avoiding the halls, David seemed to call me to his office more frequently. Today, he called me in to see if I had updated my files yet, again reminding me of the difficult position the firm would be in if I suddenly dropped dead. This hypothetical was starting to freak me out. As I was leaving, David asked how my parents had taken the news. Since, in his mind, I ate dinner with them looking six months pregnant, I thought it best to come up with a story.
“They’re excited. They want me to move back in so that th
ey can be with their grandbaby at all times.”
“Really? I’d kill my daughter.”
“Your daughter is nineteen, I’m twenty-eight. I’m pretty sure my parents put plecebos in my birth control in order to cause this very result.”
“I don’t care how old my daughter is, I’d still kill her.”
“I’m sure you won’t have to worry, she’s a good girl and she’ll probably be married off by her twenty-first birthday.”
“I hope so, she’s not very smart. She needs to find a rich man.”
I found it interesting that David spent forty grand a year for his daughter to attend a small, private liberal-arts college, when he thought her calling in life was to marry wealthy. I also couldn’t believe that David would throw his daughter under the bus like that. I could have an I.Q. of eleven and my delusional parents would still tell me that I could be CEO of MENSA if I put my mind to it. Proof of this is Jason. He maintains a straight C average and watches television nine hours a day, but my parents are looking forward to touring the University of Florida with him next year, just like they did with John and me. I’d love to see his personal statement to get into a college. Jason uses “fuck’n” as a prefix and “n’shit” as a suffix for nearly all of his sentences. For example, “Fuck’n, let’s go get coffee n’shit.” I should set Jason up with David’s daughter.
After the powwow, I went back to my desk and started updating my files so the business of insurance companies suing insurance companies could go on in the event of my untimely passing, or more realistically, my maternity leave. As I was doing this, David sent out an email congratulating one of my coworkers for settling his first case. I hate these emails because they’re always entitled “Congratz.” Few things are more annoying to me than intentionally misspelling something to be “kool.”
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