“I’m sorry,” Satish said before picking up his coffee and taking a sip.
“It’s okay; it was a long time ago.” Claire picked up her coffee, as well, and took a deep sip.
When she looked over the rim of her cup, Satish realized he was staring at her. She didn’t break her gaze, though, and he thought with a sudden shock that she was the most quietly beautiful woman he had ever seen. He had known she was attractive, but that glimpse of vulnerability had brought such softness to her that he ached. He took a deep breath and put down his coffee cup.
“Shall we get down to business?” Satish motioned to the pile of papers in front of her.
“Oh, gosh, sorry.” She laughed as she reached behind her ear and pulled out a pen. “I am going to leave these with you to take a look at today, if you would like to provide me with some feedback. It’s going well. I met with a small group of salespeople yesterday and they had some great ideas. I have started to write the BRD in what I hope is an agreeable template. The problem is that these requirements are entirely different from the existing software, so I’m getting worried about the time this will take and what on Earth I am going to tell Nick.”
Satish pulled the papers toward him and flipped through them. He marveled at how much information she had already managed to gather. “Don’t worry about Nick,” he said. “I have decided that it is about time I took care of him once and for all. I will visit him this afternoon and let him know what we are doing, but first I will meet with the Global VP and explain why he won’t get his tool in five weeks. I’ll tell him that it was the initial investigation that made us realize it wouldn’t be possible—that way, Nick won’t look so bad.”
“That is a huge relief. Thank you,” Claire said as she tucked her pen behind her ear and grabbed her coffee. “Well, I am going to go start my day. I have requirements sessions to focus on.”
Satish stood to shake her hand and let go reluctantly. “You are doing an admirable job, Claire, for someone so new at this. I admire your drive.”
She rewarded him with a brilliant smile. “Thank you. You know, I moved my sewing machine onto the floor, so I can use my desk space at home. It takes a lot to distract me from my sewing, but you have.” A blooming pink crept up her cheeks, then. “I mean the project has, of course—the project has distracted me.”
A huge laugh built up inside Satish at the sight of her mortified blush, and he amazed himself by letting it out. He had rarely felt so relaxed in another’s presence; the only time he laughed like that was in front of Nandita’s emails. “I hope I can distract you further, Claire. I mean the project, of course—the project can distract you.”
Claire grinned at him. “See you tomorrow. Same time, same place!”
She blew out of the room, leaving behind a scent of lily of the valley and a big smile on Satish’s face.
After Claire had rushed from his office, it didn’t take long for Satish’s smile to fade. Honestly, what did he think he was doing? He was enjoying Claire’s company a little too much, and this was irresponsible of him for a number of reasons. First, she worked with him, for God’s sake. He had witnessed enough work flirtations get ground through the rumor mill to understand the damage they could do to one’s reputation and career. Second, she was so young—and, he imagined, impressionable. She seemed self-confident and aware, but truthfully, he had no understanding of her emotional vulnerability. If she were to feel the same strange draw to him as he felt to her, he wouldn’t want to give her the wrong impression. The third reason, he could not face right now, but thinking of it reminded him that he still needed to respond to Nandita.
As he sat down to edit his reply, he felt a flood of relief that he had not sent it prior to Claire’s visit. It would not do to encourage Nandita’s rebellious nature. This philosophical discussion on the nature of love and relationships, duty and choice, was one he could not afford to enter with his little sister. He had a duty, and although he was becoming more disillusioned with his father’s intentions, any rebellion on the part on Nandita could only hurt her in the long run. Satish knew what happened to girls who were ostracized from their families—it was not something he could bear for his sister.
My dearest sister, you are too bold. You should be careful in addressing your elders in such a manner. The experience that I have or do not have in love is irrelevant to this conversation. You say you believe that love should come from an uncontrollable, surprising spark, but Nandita, sparks like that appear from thin air and vanish just as quickly. Sparks will not result in fire unless you have kindling and paper to support that spark. Sparks cannot be tended, but fires can. As long as one tends a fire, the embers will always be there and can always be re-ignited.
It is your duty to marry Naveen, the groom your mother and our father have chosen for you. Please re-consider. If you don’t, you will only make our father angry, and that will be bad for you. Let me see what I can do about the education—perhaps he will listen to me on that subject. Perhaps he will wait for your marriage until you have had the opportunity to go to university. I must warn you that I don’t have much influence with him, but what little I do have I will use on your behalf. Stay calm, little sister, and try not to cause a rift.
11
Claire
A week later, Claire and Maureen were sitting at Claire’s commandeered sewing table, poring over the first draft of the completed business requirements. The week had gone very well, and with Maureen’s help, the business requirements looked great for a first-time effort. Claire was constantly worried about whether Satish was satisfied with the results. After their first coffee meeting, she had felt excited about working with him. He hadn’t seemed to be the cold, distant authoritarian that was his general reputation. His warmth and friendliness had surprised her, which was why it was so distressing when his character and their relationship changed completely during the past week.
He was pleasant enough to her, but he was all business. He stayed in his seat and frequently turned from her to type notes or check on his computer. She had not even been able to find a comfortable place in the conversation to drop in a single non-business remark. Claire worried that her work wasn’t up to par—that she was disappointing him.
Sally was slouched in the sagging couch, flipping through the TV channels at speed, clearly not processing what was on one before she went to the next. Her legs were sprawled in front of her across the narrow room, and she was tapping her left foot persistently against the leg of Claire’s chair.
“Sal, could ya—” Claire blew her bangs out of her eyes to give Sally the full strength of her glare.
“Could I what?” she asked, not taking her eyes off of the TV.
“Could you stop?”
“Stop what?” she continued banging the leg of Claire’s chair.
“What is up with you, anyway? You have been moping around the apartment for days.” Maureen looked up and shifted in her seat nervously.
“What is up with me, Claire, is that I am bored freaking stiff and I am pissed off! You have broken two dinner dates and one drink date this week. I have had to deal with Nadia’s bullshit all on my own every night at the Green Knoll, most of which is speculating why you are trying to impress Nick and if you are really sleeping with him. All you guys do is this stupid work stuff. Does it have to take up every minute of your life—at the expense of your friends? You didn’t even sew this much, but at least then I got a tank top out of it.”
“Sorry, Sal. It won’t be much longer.” Claire got up and walked the short distance to the kitchen to grab a bag of potato chips. She had persuaded herself that the reduction of wine in her diet made up for the extra junk calories she was consuming.
“Oh no, you don’t.” Sally snatched the bag out of her hands. “You promised me we would go to Maxwell’s tonight for dinner, and I am starving! I know you—if you eat those, you will claim you aren’t hungry and you won’t go out!”
Maureen had been scribbling furiously with her head do
wn, but at this, she stopped and raised her head. “You can’t go out, Claire; we’re almost done.”
“’You can’t go out, Claire; we’re almost done,’” mimicked Sally viciously. Claire looked at her in surprise and Maureen shrank into her shoe. “Since when did you become our social director?” Sally continued. “Why are you around here all the time, anyway? What’s in this for you? Or is it just the fact that you don’t have a life?” Sally stormed to the door and grabbed her jacket. With dramatic flair, she turned before her exit and flashed her eyes at Claire. ”If you think that your darling Satish will be impressed with you, you are kidding yourself. Someone told me he’s gay.” The door slammed behind her.
Claire leaned down and picked up her discarded potato chips. “She’ll get over it,” she said to the cowering Maureen. “She’s just used to getting her own way.”
They listened to Sally’s steps pounding out an angry retreat, and then Maureen turned to Claire. “What did she mean by 'your darling Satish?’ You’re not having a relationship with him, are you?”
“No, Maureen, I am not having a relationship with Satish—don’t be silly. I just told Sally that I… liked him, that’s all—that I thought he was great.” She shot Maureen a wry smile, “Me and the rest of the company, right?” Maureen looked at her for a long time and then lowered her head. Her shiny hair fell forward in sheets, and Claire thought once again how pretty she was. She looked a little shaky, though, and had gone completely silent. “I was just joking, Maureen,” Claire moved to the woman’s side and crouched to lift the hair from her face. She was surprised to see Maureen’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t mean to say you liked Satish. Did something happen with him?”
Maureen sat up and stuck the heels of both hands hard into her eye sockets. Her fists were so tight that her fingers were turning white. Claire wondered how she had managed to make both Sally and Maureen so angry. “Not with Satish.” Maureen went still again and Claire waited. Her coworker drummed her hands into her eyes a few times before removing them. “Do you want to know why I am helping you…and how I know so much about what to do?”
Claire sat back on her haunches. “Yes, if you want to tell me,” she said tentatively.
Maureen spilled it—the whole, sordid story. She had been only twenty-one when she started working for Nick. Claire tried to keep a calm face as she confronted a horrible vision of where this story was going. Nick had been different, then, she said—or at least she had thought so, at the time. She had started as his admin, but he’d soon approached her with an opportunity to work as a business analyst. The vice-president of IT had been an older member of the “boy’s club” and had been with the company for many years. He had balked at Maureen working on one of his projects, so Nick, who was also new at the time, had assured the VP that he saw promise in her and would mentor her every step of the way.
“I was grateful,” Maureen teared up again. “I believed that Nick had seen something in me. I was so excited about the job and I thought I was good at it.”
She had started spending a lot of time in Nick’s office, and it wasn’t long before he’d suggested they continue a late afternoon meeting at a bar. She admitted she had been a little suspicious when he suggested a bar far from the office, but she’d quickly put it out of her mind, because she was having such a good time. She had been learning so much and feeling confident and powerful for the first time in her life.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a little shy,” Maureen said. “Nick seemed interested in me as a person; he told me that my skills and ambition were impressive and attractive. I was flattered and started to think that maybe he even liked me, you know. I mean, I was living alone in this terrible studio apartment, barely scraping by with my rent so high, and here was this smooth, charming businessman taking me out for expensive dinners and driving me home in his BMW. I got kind of swept up in it.”
She had been so swept up, she told Claire, that she had started sleeping with him. At this revelation, it took everything Claire had to hide her revulsion. She couldn’t imagine letting Nick getting anywhere near her body with those slimy hands. If he did, she was sure she would knee him in the groin.
Maureen stopped speaking, noted Claire’s struggle, and sighed. “I know what you are thinking, Claire, but you are beautiful—you probably have men swooning over you all the time. This was the first time anyone had paid attention to me, and I liked it. In hindsight, I guess I also felt sort of obligated. At the time, though, I thought something was happening between us.”
Claire moved up to sit in her chair, and she reached across the table to grab Maureen’s hands, knocking a pile of pens to the floor in the process. “Maureen, you underestimate yourself. You are so smart and interesting and pretty—if you were only a little more confident.”
“Well, Nick pretty much obliterated any confidence I had managed to develop when I was with him. I have been struggling for five years to get over what happened.”
“What happened?” Claire asked.
Nick had continued to woo her and succeeded. Maureen had fallen in love. After four months together, Nick had gotten more and more serious; he told her they had a future together. He’d started talking about taking her on vacation to exotic places—places she had only dreamed of—and she had been the happiest she’d ever been. She had an exciting romance and her career was skyrocketing, because it turned out that she had a knack for being an analyst and people at work had noticed. She had been so happy with Nick that she’d even called her parents in Ohio to tell them about him. They had asked her to bring him home on her next visit, and Nick had agreed to go.
“Hang on,” Claire interrupted her. “Something is missing here. Isn’t Nick married?”
Maureen took her hand from Claire’s and wrapped her arms around herself. She breathed a shaky sigh and wiped her eyes. “I didn’t know.”
Of course, Nick hadn’t told her, and she’d had no reason to suspect a thing. Nick had always been available when she wanted to speak to him—although she realized afterward that it had been mostly at work—and she’d gone out with him at least three times each week. He had sometimes not been available on the weekends, but she had been afraid to push too hard. They had only been together four months and she wasn’t sure of the timeline for how these things developed. He’d said he had lots of male friends he couldn’t ignore and told Maureen that a good woman would accept that a man needed his friends.
“Asshole,” Claire shook her head. “So, what happened?”
Apparently, one of his wife’s friends had seen them at their favorite restaurant a few times. The friend had told Nick’s wife, and one night, she was outside the restaurant, waiting for them.
“It was terrible, Claire.” Maureen had started to cry quietly. “He acted like I didn’t even exist. He started begging and pleading with her, telling her he would never see me again—that I meant nothing to him. I was just some young floozy who only managed to seduce him because he was under so much stress.”
Claire picked up a stray piece of muslin from her scraps bucket and wiped Maureen’s eyes with it. Her coworker took it from her and started folding it into tiny squares as she continued her story.
“She was looking at me with such hate, and I couldn’t say a word in my defense. I was terrified. She told him that they would discuss it further at home and to get in the car. He went back to his car, and she just stood there for a few minutes, staring at me. Finally, she said, ‘You are a worthless bitch. Find some other man to drive you home. I’m sure you know how to reimburse him.’ She drove away with Nick, and they left me there.”
“Oh my God, Maureen, I can’t believe it! Did you tell anyone? Did you confront him?”
“I stayed out of work for three days, but he kept calling me at home. Finally, I decided I couldn’t stay home and hide forever, plus I didn’t want to lose my job, so I went in. He called me into his office and you’d never believe it: he pulled me into a hug and said he was sor
ry I had to go through. He said we would be more discreet in the future, so it wouldn’t happen again.”
“What did you say?”
Maureen looked angry, now. “I told him he was crazy and that it definitely wouldn’t happen again, because I was never going to see him again outside of the office. He was so angry, Claire. I don’t know how he did it, but he got me demoted back to an admin in the IT department, and every attempt I have made to move up has been thwarted by him. I don’t know how, but I know it’s him, because I have watched him go through the same routine with three other girls since. Two got promoted when he got tired of them and one left the company. I think I am the only one who ever rejected him. So, that’s why I am helping you.”
“Why, though? Surely you know I won’t sleep with him.” Claire said, “If I am his next target, won’t that get me fired?”
“Of course I know you won’t sleep with him. I have watched him get more and more careless with his targets. I guess weak, little girls like me are too easy for him, now—he wants more of a challenge. I think he made a mistake picking you, though.”
Claire shook her head in confusion. “You don’t think I’ll get fired?”
“No, because there are two differences that haven’t applied in the past. One is that you have brains. I think you can do this job and do it well, and it will be very difficult for him to fire you if everyone knows how good you are. The second reason is that we finally have a man of integrity in our midst. Satish Bhatt is one of the kindest and most noble men I have ever met. Whatever stories Nick told to blackball me stuck, because I was nobody and I had no one on my side. If Satish knows how good you are—and he already does—he would never allow you to get fired without a good reason, and Nick won’t have one.”
Claire looked at Maureen’s streaky face and her arms still wrapped around her body and she felt a rush of sympathy for her. She thought of how horrible it must have been to get caught in those terrible circumstances. She could also understand, knowing Maureen’s personality, why she had suffered so long in silence. Just then, realization hit Claire.
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