“Literally into a whale?” I asked. “That must have been a sight.” I wasn’t quite sure how or why the conversation had turned to how fat Kendra’s last assistant was, but I just smiled politely and let her continue.
“A total whale,” she said. “So you’re in for an interesting time. Let me give you a few pieces of advice straight off. If you ever need a ladies room with some privacy, use the fifth floor because those offices are unoccupied. Just don’t let anybody see you because they’ll know you had to go number two. Second, Roberta is a moron. If you need anything, don’t go to her. Come to me. I don’t work for your company, but I know more about it than she does. Third, there’s a Fed Ex guy named Fitz, or Fartz, I don’t really know which. But he does this thing where he pretends to drop a package so girls in the building will bend over to pick it up for him. Avoid him at all costs.”
Boy could she talk. It was as if I was the first person to walk through those doors in ten years.
“I’ll keep those things in mind,” I said. “Thanks.”
“I try to learn as much as I can about the people in this building. I talk to everybody. I would say I spend ninety percent of my day talking to people.”
“Wow, really? Ninety percent?”
“Between eighty and ninety. There’s not much else to do down here. Oh, one last thing. Ms. Stoltz’s husband is some kind of power hungry pervert. He works here too, and he always comes down to ask me to do things for him.”
The phone on the reception desk had been ringing for the last twenty seconds, but she ignored it.
“Like I said, I don’t even work for your company, but he doesn’t care. I think he actually feels like he can get away with sexual harassment because of that. I mean one time,” she leaned in closer to me, “he insisted on helping me move some boxes that I totally didn’t need any help with. When he asked me where I wanted them I said ‘anywhere,’ and he goes ‘good because I’ll put it anywhere you want it.”
“Gross!” I said, crinkling my nose. But that sounded about right. The same guy who had asked me to play Twister at the Christmas party had quite the reputation around the office as well.
“Exactly. So beware. Marisa used to avoid him like the plague.” She rolled over to grab something off the printer. “My name’s Charlene, by the way.”
“Tessa.” I smiled and shook her hand. The hand shake caused Charlene to stop talking for about three seconds, and I jumped at the opportunity to excuse myself. I thanked her again for all her helpful, though somewhat disturbing, information, and watched myself walk toward the shiny golden elevators doors. Everything in this building was highly reflective. I came out on the 32nd floor across from a set of heavy glass doors outlined in cherry trim. Gold lettering above the door frame read Flamhauser-Geist and I had the weird sensation of being in an alternate universe.
I pulled open the door and immediately recognized Kendra standing by the reception desk, apparently awaiting my arrival. She looked different from the last time I’d seen her, without her gown and her diamonds, but she was still one of the most beautiful people I have ever met. Her long blonde hair fell in waves that my own hair could only dream about. Where her clingy black sweater dress ended, knee high leather boots took over. Miles of gold chains coiled themselves around her neck. Her makeup looked professionally done, though I knew that was impossible on a Monday morning. She was simply Engineering Barbie in the flesh. The older woman seated at the desk next to her, who I took to be the useless Roberta Mallard, looked annoyed.
“Tessa!” Kendra greeted me with such familiarity and enthusiasm that I almost turned to check if her long lost friend Tessa had walked in behind me.
“Kendra!” I held out my hand for a shake, but she instead pulled me in for a hug. She even smelled expensive.
“Thank you so much for coming! How’s the car? And the hotel? Did you find the office okay?” It was hard to keep track of all the questions. It seemed that everybody in the building talked a mile a minute.
“Yes, thank you!” I said. “Everything is unbelievable. You really shouldn’t have given me all those things. I'm totally spoiled.”
“Oh please! It was a huge deal for you to pack up and come out here like this. It’s the least I could do.” She turned to Roberta, who was looking more annoyed by the minute. “Roberta, I’d like you to meet my new assistant, Tessa. Tessa, this is Roberta, our receptionist.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Roberta, giving me the once-over. I wonder if women honestly think you don’t notice when they do that. She stared at my boobs for at least five seconds before moving down to check out the size of my waist. Donna Spang may have met her match.
“You too,” I said, giving her the once-over right back. She looked to be in her mid-forties, and thin as a rail, which is not always a good look for somebody her age. Boobs? No where to be found.
“Aren’t you a tiny little thing,” she said. “Do you eat?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re so thin. I myself never have much of an appetite." She motioned to an uneaten apple on her desk.
“I eat a lot, actually,” I said. I gave Kendra a confused look.
“I don’t think Tessa wants to discuss this right now, Roberta,” said Kendra, rolling her eyes. “Come on, I’ll show you to your desk.”
“What’s with her?” I asked as we headed across the office. We passed cubicle after cubicle but showed no signs of slowing down.
“Oh, she’s just weight obsessed,” said Kendra. “The woman prides herself on eating nothing but raisins and lettuce. We all figure she goes home every night and gorges on Doritos. You should have heard her talk about Marisa after she gained all that pregnancy weight. Pure disgust.”
“You know that's the second time in about fifteen minutes that somebody has mentioned Marisa’s weight?” I smiled back at a couple of cute guys who were talking next to a water cooler .
“That’s because we have more than a few busybodies in this building. But you’ll grow to love them.”
“Yeah, we had busybodies back in Massachusetts too,” I said. “But the love thing never really happened.”
We finally arrived at the opposite end of the building where a plaque that read “Kendra Stoltz” was fastened to the door of the corner office. On the door of the office directly next to it was a plaque taped over with a piece of paper that read “Tessa Golden.” Yes, that’s right, an office. My office.
“Home sweet home,” said Kendra, stepping in ahead of me. An expanse of windows lined the wall in front of us, and I gasped at the view of the city that I had from the 32nd story. How on earth would I ever be able to work? I peeled myself away from the windows long enough to soak in the rest of my surroundings. Everything was either white, black, or lilac, and everything was new. I could not see so much as an outdated paperclip. The flat panel monitor on the desk was one of the most impressive features, as back home my monitor is about three feet deep and I am physically incapable of lifting it. This was turning out to be an alternate universe indeed. Lilac shag carpeting covered the floor beneath a huge white leather desk chair. I sat down and spun around a couple of times. A fish tank stood to the right of the door, filled with exotic looking fish and lilac colored gravel.
“Holy shit,” I said. I looked up at Kendra and shook my head. “Do you have any idea what my other office is like? Wait, let me rephrase that. Do you have any idea what my cubicle was like?”
“That’s the beauty of working for me. I treat my employees the way I would want to be treated.” She picked a remote control up off the bookshelves and pushed a button. Classical music began playing from speakers positioned around the room. “And I wouldn’t expect anything less than the best.” She watched for my reaction and snorted when I mouthed the words “holy shit” again. I couldn’t seem to think of anything else to say.
“I guess Marisa was into classical,” she said. “But you can play whatever you like. I have a ton of CD’s if you want to borrow anything.”
> “Yes, definitely. Thank you!” I said. “Really, Kendra, I’m at a loss for words here. I can’t even believe we work the way we do back in Massachusetts. It’s like a prison camp compared to this.”
“Well, when you’re two degrees from the owner of the company, you reap the benefits.” She shrugged and pulled open the door of a mini refrigerator to reveal a case of beer and several bottles of wine. “For after hours.”
“Nice,” I said. “But I think I need to let all of this sink in before I’ll be ready for any after hours festivities.”
“Fair enough,” said Kendra. “I’ll let you get settled. Your email is all set up, and you have full internet access. I know the fuddy-duddies in HR block certain websites, but that doesn’t apply here.” She gave me a wink. “Other than being way less crappy, we’re very similar to your old office in terms of the work we do. It should be smooth sailing for you.”
Kendra left me alone and headed back into her own office where she must have picked up another remote control, because I heard the muffled sounds of Eminem filtering through the wall.
I smiled to myself as I scrolled through my email, finding it hard not to spin around and stare out the windows. There weren't many emails to scroll through anyway, just a few office-wide ones from people I did not yet know, informing me that they were heading out on site visits to cities that I had never heard of. Everything about my life was new and fresh, down to the very clothes that I was wearing.
Ah, screw it.
I abandoned my email and rolled over to the window. This was the change that I needed, I could feel it in my bones. My tired, uninspired bones were slowly but surely coming back to life. Maybe I would start working on my art again while I was out here. Not just paperclip and pushpin art, but the kind of stuff that I did back in college. I mean, sure I was in Las Vegas and there were plenty of things to distract me on the weekends, but in all honesty, who was I going to hang out with? I was probably going to be spending a lot of time alone in my hotel room, and if I ever wanted to dig myself out of this secretarial hole, now would be the perfect time to get started.
- 7 -
A knock at the door startled me from my thoughts. I turned around to find a pretty woman, who I guessed to be in her fifties, wearing a peach blouse, white pants, and a smoking hot pair of gold stilettos. She smiled and introduced herself as Sharon Bloom, head of Human Resources. Margaret Sherman she was not. When Margaret Sherman’s sour face walks into a room you want to jump out the window, but Sharon practically lit the place up. She spent the next hour showing me around the office and introducing me to about three thousand people whose names I immediately forgot. We zigzagged our way through all three floors, meeting engineers, draftsmen, secretaries, accountants, human resources reps, and countless other people, who, in all honesty, I would probably never see again for the duration of my three months in Vegas.
"Oh," said Sharon after we had arrived back outside my office, "I almost forgot to introduce you to Chris and Dan. You'll be working quite a bit with those two, come on."
I followed Sharon into the office immediately next to mine and suddenly felt like I was back in college. Their office was at least twice the size of my own but resembled a dorm room more than a workspace. It was divided down the middle by two video game chairs positioned in front of a flat screen television. A trophy on top of the mini-fridge read Flamhauser-Geist Ping-Pong Champions - 2008, and a row of empty beer cans lined the windowsill behind the television. Seated in the game chairs were the two cute guys I had smiled at by the water cooler.
"Tessa, this is Chris Brewer and Dan Bryant," said Sharon. "Dan is the one annihilating aliens at the moment."
"Nice to meet you," said Chris. He jumped up to shake my hand. "We were just taking a little, uh, break." He glanced at his watch, seeming to remember that it wasn't anywhere close to lunch time. "Kendra got us the video games as sort of a stress reliever."
"Oh, please," I said. "No need to explain to me!" I smiled when I noticed a familiar emblem on the front of his polo shirt - a pink kitten caught mid-spin around a stripper pole. "Classy shirt, by the way."
"Yeah? I've got about six more at home," said Chris. "Dan and I work on The Jiggly Kitty account with Kendra, so we're always getting free goodies."
“So what’s the Kitty like back in Massachusetts?” asked Dan over his shoulder.
“It's okay, I guess. Relatively speaking." I shrugged. "I've only been to one of them, and just one time. I don’t really have much to compare it to."
“Really?” said Dan. “Chris and I go there for lunch everyday. We design the parking lot, and they give us free access to the buffet. It’s a sweet little deal we have worked out.”
“He’s joking,” said Chris, turning slightly pink. “I wouldn’t eat lunch at a strip club if my life depended on it.”
“But dinner you’re cool with?” I asked.
“And what kind of situation would lead to your life depending on eating lunch at a strip club?” asked Dan.
“Okay, okay,” interrupted Sharon. “You’ve officially met Chris and Dan, shall we move on? She rolled her eyes and gently pulled me by the elbow as a signal that it was time to move on to meet much less interesting people.
“You know,” I said, as we turned to leave, “it’s much colder in Massachusetts. So I think the strippers just wear more clothes.”
***
As soon as I had settled back into my office, Chris appeared with a legal pad full of handwritten scribbles that needed to be typed.
“I hate to do this to you on your first day,” he said.
“Whatever,” I told him, “I’m a secretary, typing is my sole purpose in life.”
“Cool, thanks.” He dropped the papers in front of me, along with a snack sized Butterfinger bar. “And also, that’s a little sad.”
I laughed. “Well, someday I hope to find another purpose. Perhaps photocopying.”
“It’s good to have goals,” he said. He lingered in my doorway a bit and then motioned to the candy. “Dan and I have stock in Nestle, so um, come by whenever you want." His cheeks turned pink for the second time since I'd met him, and he adjusted his glasses. He smiled sheepishly at me and then quickly disappeared from my doorway.
Chris was kind of hot in a Clark Kent sort of way, and he was already nicer than ninety percent of the people I worked with back home. A quick scan of his hand had revealed no wedding ring.
"Get a grip, Tessa. You have a perfectly nice married man waiting for you back home." I shook the thought from my head and dove into my first assignment.
***
I had a meeting with Kendra before lunch, as she wanted to give me the rundown on Jiggly Kitty President, and Flamhauser-Geist VIP client, Rob Dorfman, before he came in for his weekly status meeting the next day. The term “VIP client” refers to someone whose butt must be kissed on a regular basis, regardless of how much you despise their personality, and Rob Dorfman’s personality ranked right up there with dog shit and rocks. You would think that somebody whose entire life and business was focused around beautiful naked women would have something to smile about, but this was not the case. I think that when Rob Dorfman looks at a stripper all he sees is dollar signs, and they tend to get in the way of the important parts. He is not a pleasant man to say the least, and back in Massachusetts I was lucky enough to only deal with him over the telephone. But since The Jiggly Kitty is headquartered here in Las Vegas, my luck was about to run out.
While Kendra rifled through one of her desk drawers I wandered around her office looking at the paintings on the walls. They were quite good. An old man and a little boy, three girls on a bench. They were mostly of people doing everyday things, and I couldn’t help but notice that the colors of each painting accented the office decor perfectly, as if they had been painted to match. I was surprised to see the initials KS painted lightly in the corner, and was about to ask Kendra if she had painted them herself, when her desk drawer slammed shut.
“This,
” she said, holding up an 8 x10 photograph, “is Rob Dorfman.”
She actually had a picture of the guy in her desk. Four smiling people were giving a thumbs up in front of a glass door sporting The Jiggly Kitty logo. The photo had been taken at the grand opening of the latest Jiggly Kitty project, and from the smiles on their faces you would think they had found a cure for cancer. The two men on the outside I did not recognize, but there was Kendra in the middle, and next to her, she pointed out, was Rob Dorfman. I busted out laughing. He was rosy cheeked and about four inches shorter than her. His suit probably cost more than I make in a year, but he was practically swimming in it.
Son of a bitch, I thought, he looks like a kid at his Bar Mitzvah.
“No way!” I said looking up at Kendra. “How the heck old is he?” All the years that I had spent bowing down to the little slime ball, calling him "Sir," and this is what he looked like? I suddenly didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
“Twenty-six,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”
“No!” I said. “I always assumed he was in his forties!”
“Nope. He started the Kitty right out of college. His dad gave him a handful of millions to start up his own business, and that’s what he came up with. The little freak.”
I handed Kendra back the photograph and fell into her white leather couch. I could not believe that I had actually called somebody two years younger than me “Sir.”
“You should hear the way he speaks to me,” she said. “But Dad tells me that his wish is my command, so what choice do I have?” She plopped down on the couch next to me and continued to explain that we had six projects in the works for Jiggly Kitty’s throughout Nevada and Arizona, and that every Tuesday morning Rob came by the office to check on their progress.
Arrangements had to be made each week before his big arrival. First off, Rob refused to drink Flamhauser-Geist brewed coffee, yet he also refused to bring his own, so it was my responsibility to fetch him a Venti low-fat, no whip, mocha from Starbucks. Even worse, I must time the coffee purchase perfectly, because if it was not piping hot I would be in for a verbal assault. Second, the two potted palm trees in the conference room must be relocated due to a severe allergic reaction he had in Hawaii when he was four. Finally, all pages over the office intercom must cease because Rob cannot stand the sound of Roberta Mallard's voice. I will admit that the last rule made me giggle. Kendra went through about fifteen other rules and requirements, when I put my hand up and stopped her.
What Stays in Vegas Page 4