“Do NOTHING for fifteen minutes every day. Take five deep breaths three times a day. Go for a walk. Have some fun. Chill.”
Lisa smiled as she read the note. I didn’t understand why she didn’t laugh.
“Honestly, Maya. This is the best prescription you could possibly get. In fact, this is exactly what you need!”
She leaned forward and took my hand, as she often did when she wanted to make a point.
“Look at you; always busy, always working, always doing something, checking your emails, being on the phone, never resting, hardly sleeping. You need a break, to relax a bit, have some real chill-time. Maybe even get laid.”
Getting laid was Lisa’s go-to solution for most problems in life.
“I don’t have time to do nothing,” I said. “And honestly, Lisa, getting laid is about the last thing on my mind right now.”
I moved toward the bar for another glass of wine, but Lisa took my hand and gently held me back, so I had to sit down on my chair again.
“I know, but it’s been the last thing on your mind for seven years,” she said, leaning over the table and reaching for my other hand. She was clearly not letting me escape this time.
“He was a jerk, Maya. He took advantage of you. And he almost raped you. But most men are not like him. And you have to stop thinking that they are.” Lisa teared up. I could see her jaw clenching. I knew I was scarred by the incident, even though I’d done my best not to dwell on it. Still, it always took me by surprise, being reminded of how sad and angry Lisa was about what had happened to me, even after all this time.
“I still can’t believe you let that bastard get away with it. He was your goddamn boss! He should have been punished. And instead, you were the one who lost your job.”
I carefully patted her hand. “It’s OK, Lisa. I’ve moved on. You should, too.”
“But that’s the thing,” Lisa said, and looked at me with teary eyes. “You haven’t.”
An alert on my phone saved me.
“Just a moment,” I said, ignoring Lisa’s rolling eyes.
It was a text message from my boss.
“Be in my office tomorrow, 7 am. Alistair.”
I felt like I’d just been kicked in the stomach.
“What’s wrong, Maya?” Lisa asked, concerned. “You look pale.”
I swallowed hard and heard my own voice as if it came from far away.
“Sorry, but I have to go. I think I might get fired tomorrow.”
ALISTAIR PARKER
The next day, at 6:50 a.m., I walked into the office building and took the elevator straight to the thirty-seventh floor. Agnes was already there, milling around her desk with some of the other executive assistants. She looked surprised to see me.
“I’m meeting with Alistair at seven,” I said, looking over at Alistair’s closed office door. The indicator lamp was glowing red.
Agnes looked down at her iPad, then looked up at me and shook her head with a slightly condescending smile.
“Sorry, you’re not on Alistair’s agenda today. Do you want me to schedule a meeting for you another day?” Her smile was as cold as ice.
I don’t know quite what got into me, but I lashed out: “I don’t care whether I’m on your stupid agenda or not. Alistair sent me a text last night. We’re meeting at seven, so can you please drop the attitude and let him know I’m here?”
I was as surprised as Agnes by my outburst.
I was wondering whether to apologize when Alistair opened his door and waved me in. Agnes didn’t look up when I passed her desk.
I walked into Alistair’s office and stood in front of his desk, waiting for my sentence, like a convict in front of the judge.
Alistair sat down in his brown leather chair behind his large mahogany desk and waved his hand toward the smaller leather chair on the opposite side.
“Have a seat, Maya,” he said, and I sat down carefully on the edge of the chair. I looked directly at him and was surprised by what I saw.
The always groomed, well-dressed Alistair Parker looked terrible, as if he hadn’t showered or slept for days.
“You opened up quite a can of worms yesterday, Maya,” he said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “That unresolved bug cannot become public knowledge,” he continued after a brief pause. “Any doubt whatsoever about the safety of our products could destroy everything we have built over the last twenty years.”
I wondered if this was his warm-up to firing me.
After another moment of silence, he continued. “Tomorrow afternoon there is an important investors’ conference where I am scheduled to speak. We show up every year, together with ten other tech companies, fighting for investors’ money, impressing the hell out of the financial analysts, and making sure that faith in our company continues to grow.”
I remained quiet, waiting for him to explain why he was telling me this.
“I can’t leave the office until the issue has been resolved. But if we don’t show up at the conference, rumors may start.”
For the first time that morning, Alistair looked directly at me.
“I’ve seen you with customers, and I’ve seen you onstage, Maya. You are knowledgeable, trustworthy, and ruthless. I need you to represent me at the investors’ conference tomorrow.”
I just stared at him. I guess I should have been relieved—at least I wasn’t getting fired. But this? Representing TechnoGuard’s CEO at an investors’ conference?
“I want you to go on that stage and tell the analysts and investors that all is well, that our cybersecurity solutions are 100 percent reliable, and that their money is entirely safe with us.”
“So, you want me to lie?” The words jumped out of my mouth and sounded way more critical than I had intended. Alistair’s eyes turned to ice.
“I want you to do your job, to do what is best for the company. If that means to lie, then, yes, you will do that. And in case you thought this was a question, it wasn’t. It’s an order.”
Those three words rubbed me the wrong way, but I was smart enough not to let it show.
“By the way,” he continued, “the conference is on the island Kaua’i in Hawaii, so I suggest you go home and pack. I’ll tell Agnes to book you on a flight that leaves this afternoon. I’ll send you the PowerPoint presentation with my speaker notes. You’ll have plenty of time on the plane to memorize it all.”
When he finished, Alistair looked back at his computer screen, gesturing with his hand that I was dismissed.
As I was about to leave his office, he called out: “And by the way, Maya. If you can pull this off, the Executive VP title and the corner office will be yours when you return. Mike won’t be needing it any longer.”
OK, I might not like being given orders, but I did like the reward for following them. I decided to push away the uncomfortable feeling in my gut and tell myself that it would be worth it in the end.
I would finally achieve my career goal, get the corner office, be in power, and become everything I’d ever dreamed of.
But I wasn’t naïve. Fifteen years in the corporate world had taught me this: nothing comes for free.
There is always a price to pay to get what you want.
A WALK DOWN MEMORY LANE
As I leaned back in my seat, exhausted after the mad dash through the airport, I thought about the long flight ahead of me: first to Honolulu, then another forty-minute flight to Kaua’i.
I had never been to Hawaii before and never had any desire to go there, either. I dreaded the idea of Hawaiian shirts, leis, mai tais, and mass tourism, and decided to do my best to stay away from it all.
I would do my job and then get my butt back to New York as fast as I could.
In less than four days it would all be over, and I’d be back in the city, busy moving into my new office on the thirty-seventh floor. Maya Williams, executive vice president of sales. I certainly liked the sound of that.
As soon as the plane was up in the air and the captain had tur
ned off the fasten-seatbelt sign, I opened my computer to have a look at the PowerPoint presentation Alistair had sent me a few hours earlier.
The first slides were about customer testimonials and case studies, market share, and some new technology releases. It looked fine. I continued clicking through the slides, feeling better about the whole thing, when suddenly a slide I recognized showed up. It was a slide from the presentation I had shared with the executive team the day before, but something was different. The numbers had been changed. Sales were increased by 20 percent, next quarter’s prospect had been increased by 25 percent, and it said we had closed some deals that I knew we were still working on and probably would not get.
My heart started racing. This was not good.
When I clicked to the last slide of the presentation, it stated that TechnoGuard’s cybersecurity products were 100 percent reliable and safe and had never experienced any security issues. I closed my laptop quickly.
It was one thing knowing that other people lied and acted unethically, but it was something entirely different to be told to do the same. I didn’t know how to think or feel. I needed a drink.
The cabin attendant approached with the beverage cart, and I asked for two glasses of white wine. I downed one of them even before she had finished serving me the other.
“A bit nervous about flying, are we?” She looked sympathetically at me.
“Yes.” I nodded and took a sip of the second glass, happy to have an excuse.
A chubby hand patted my knee. “No worries, we’ll be looking after her.” Mrs. Hawaiian-shirt, on my right side, winked at the cabin attendant.
Oh, Lord. If I survived this, I would deserve way more than a new title and a corner office.
“I’m Betsy, by the way,” Mrs. Hawaiian-shirt said to me.
I nodded and attempted to smile.
She pointed over to her sleeping husband. “And that’s Engelbert, my husband. He always sleeps,” she giggled. “He’s kind of cute, isn’t he?” She gave me a friendly bump with her shoulder.
“Peaceful as a child,” I said, thankful for the calming effect the wine was already having on me.
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. My mind went back to the presentation on my laptop. Damn it. This was not OK. This was borderline fraud. Still, what choice did I have? Alistair had made himself very clear. This was an order.
I took a deep breath. You can do this, Maya. You’re just doing your job. It’s only business. And sometimes the goal justifies the means. Every successful businessperson knows that.
The self-talk and second glass of wine calmed me down.
I decided I needed some distraction and started browsing through the in-flight movies. The first one that popped up was King of Lies, about Bernie Madoff. Nope. Then there was The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio. Double nope. Then The Devil Wears Prada with Meryl Streep … Geez, was someone trying to tell me something, or what?
I went to the Classic Movie selection instead, and the picture of the musical South Pacific from 1958 showed up on my screen. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by memories. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes.
It was the early 1980s and I was back at the old movie theater in Brooklyn, where my mom and I used to go and watch classic Hollywood movies a few times a month. I was about six years old when we first started and ten and a half when we stopped. We never told my dad about our trips to the cinema. Mom used to say that it was our little secret. Nor did we tell him about Giorgio, the old Italian cinematographer who opened up his little cinema for us on any afternoon we wanted to come by and watch a movie.
The movie theater didn’t look like much on the outside. It was a small house squeezed in between two taller buildings, with a worn-out “Cinema” sign and a few movie posters on the wall that looked like they had been there since the house was built.
But on the inside, it was like stepping into a magical world—with rows of big, comfortable red velvet chairs, and in between them small tables with tiny, old-fashioned lamps, and in the corner of the lobby, a big popcorn machine. I was allowed to eat as much popcorn as I wanted on those visits, and I never let the opportunity pass me by.
Giorgio was a tall man with gray hair and sad brown eyes that always lit up every time he looked at Mom.
My mom was beautiful. Old Hollywood beautiful. While most women embraced shoulder pads and neon-colored tights in the 1980s, my mom wore dresses from the 1950s, red lipstick, and sometimes even a scarf over her hair, just like Audrey Hepburn. Giorgio said she looked like a mix between Doris Day and what he thought Pocahontas might look like, with her blonde curls and almond-shaped brown eyes. She had laughed out loud and thanked him for the compliment.
“And what do my two favorite movie stars want to see today?” Giorgio always asked with his strong Italian accent as soon as we stepped through the doors of his cinema.
“South Pacific!” we usually shouted and laughed. It was our absolute favorite movie. We knew all the songs by heart and sang along during the movie, and when it ended, we always agreed that it was “the most wonderful movie ever made.”
With music and lyrics from the composers Rodgers and Hammerstein, it is a light-hearted, fun musical that addresses serious themes such as racism and prejudice alongside the telling of two love stories.
What I remembered the most from the movie was the song about Bali Ha’i. Every time I watched the movie and heard the song, my heart yearned for this mysterious place.
Bali Ha’i will whisper
Any night, any day
In your heart, you’ll hear it call you
“Come away, come away.”
Hand in hand, on our way home from Giorgio’s cinema, Mom and I often talked about how we wanted to visit Bali Ha’i one day. I loved those afternoons, and I loved our dreams.
Mom and I were best friends. My dad was working all the time and usually ate his dinners in the city, so most of the time it was just her and me. And since she couldn’t stand cooking, we just ate whatever we felt like, whenever we felt like it.
Our house was a happy mess, which often annoyed my dad; but Mom would just laugh and say she had more important things to do than to cook and clean, which I knew was true.
Mom was a very talented artist, known for her happy and colorful paintings that sold for a lot of money at a gallery in Lower Manhattan.
“Always make sure to earn your own money, Maya,” she used to tell me.
I knew when she was telling me something important, because she had a certain look in her eyes, and a determined sound to her voice.
“Only be with a man—or a woman, should you prefer that—because you want to, not because you have to.”
I would nod in serious agreement when she spoke like that, trying to memorize every word she said.
Most of the mothers of the children in my class were stay-at-home moms. I often saw them together, sitting in the park drinking coffee or standing outside the school chatting. I never saw any of them speak to my mom.
“Your mom is weird!” one of the boys in my class shouted to me one day, when I wouldn’t let him have the swing.
“She looks funny and acts weird. No one likes her and no one likes you,” he shouted before one of the teachers came running and hushed him.
After that I stopped bringing classmates home. Not because I was embarrassed, but because I didn’t think they deserved to spend time with my wonderful mom. I knew she was different from the other moms. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
One of my favorite things to do was to watch her turn blank canvases into explosions of color. Whenever she painted, her eyes sparkled, and it was like she disappeared into something or somewhere only she could go. She could paint for hours, and when she did, it was only she and her painting that existed.
I would often sit on the floor of her studio and do my homework. Sometimes, I would even make my own drawings, but I quickly found out that I didn’t have my mother’s artistic talent. On
e time she joked and said maybe I had inherited my dad’s talents instead and would be an amazing lawyer one day.
I remember being scared by that thought. I didn’t want to be like my dad. I wanted to be like her: artistic, happy, and free. My dad was always so serious. He worked all the time and didn’t seem to know what it was like to have fun.
Every night before I went to sleep, Mom would make up bedtime stories to tell me. She spoke of kings and queens, dragons and fairies, heroes and heroines, world travelers and time travelers, life under the ocean and life among the stars. Her imagination was as vast and vivid as her paintings, and I looked forward to those stories each night.
My favorite story, however, was one from real life. It was the story about a young, handsome, fair-haired sailor from a land far, far away who fell in love with a beautiful Native American woman on a stopover in New York and proposed to her after only two days. The woman, known for her ability to navigate ships by looking at the stars, had been waiting for her blond prince.
“Our story is written in the stars,” she had told him. They had gotten married, and two years later, Stella, their little baby girl, was born.
Stella grew up at sea, on boats and ships, and traveled to every corner of the world together with her adventurous parents. When the day came for her to start on her own journey, as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, the eighteen-year-old girl was left by the harbor in San Francisco.
“The stars will be watching over you,” was the last thing her mother had said before she and her blond prince sailed away, hand in hand, into the sunset.
That was the last time my mom saw her parents. Two months later their boat disappeared somewhere in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean.
“And now they live among the stars,” Mom told me.
Every night we went out in the garden and waved Grandma and Grandpa goodnight. Sometimes, I thought I could see a star blinking, and Mom told me it was them, waving back at us.
My own parents had met at an art exhibition when Mom was twenty-two and Dad was thirty. Serious, quiet, and modest, my dad couldn’t have been more different from my mom. I think they really loved each other, but they disagreed on many things. One of them was about my upbringing.
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