The Insatiables

by Brittany Terwilliger

  Phil Collins picked up pebbles with his mouth, one by one, and spit them back out again, a game he played whenever he was bored. “I know, buddy,” I said. “I haven’t been paying enough attention to you.” I put the punctured pill packet and bottle of water next to my phone on the bedside table and rolled over to stare at the plain white ceiling, running through to-do lists in my head. Strand by strand, the cords of my fever began to loosen and dissolve. My stomach still clenched, but at least it was empty. I got up to take a shower.

  Findlay European Chief Sales Manager, Managing Director, and Territory Officer Clive Villalobos—Level 6—arrived at the hotel as the sun began to fall behind the neighboring building, casting thick orange beams on the lobby floor where I waited to greet him. In a cream-colored suit, orange pointy-toed shoes, and Wayfarer sunglasses he looked like a 1950s Puerto Rican gigolo, or maybe an actor in one of those commercials for boxed wine.

  “Hi—” I began as he emerged from the revolving door.

  He proceeded to spit out a long string of gibberish. “Halley, Iyamdete fodeaconfiedancecall canjewchakmeentomydoomendabdingmedekey?”

  “What?” I asked.

  I’d only met Clive once before at a meeting in New York, but I suspected he might die soon of a cranial aneurysm. He talked so quickly and interrupted so frequently that you were lucky if you could finish a sentence in his presence. His heavy Spanish accent made almost everything he said unintelligible, a fact of which he seemed to be completely unaware. But the most unnerving thing about him was that he said my name a lot, which gave me the sense that I was always in trouble.

  He repeated himself.

  “Okay,” I replied to his back as he walked away. I fetched his room key and set it gingerly next to his gesticulating hand on the lobby table he’d chosen from which to conduct his conference call.

  I sat in a vacant lobby armchair for a moment in hopes of checking my email, but before I could pull my phone from my bag, a bellman approached.

  “Miss,” he said, “we have your packages.”

  Hotel staff had stored them in an empty meeting room because there were so many: three pallets in all, from three different countries. There were pamphlets from Findlay’s Atlanta office, product samples from our Heidelberg warehouse, and demo kits from our Shanghai factory. They were all stacked in big cubes and wrapped in sheets of plastic. I borrowed a utility knife from the bellman and began unwrapping, the plastic wrap squeaking as it collected in a big ball on the floor. Eventually I found everything there. Everything, that is, except my box from Ohio. The box Molly had promised to send.

  I knew it! Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

  My only option was to get everything reprinted at a local copy shop. I had the digital files on my laptop in case of an emergency. But that was going to take hours.

  I opened the web browser on my phone and started searching for copy shops and frantically dialing. The first one was closed. The second went straight to voicemail. After the third failed attempt, I sat on the floor of the package room and had myself a good cry. Sure it was unprofessional, but I had been sick for twelve hours, gotten a parking ticket, lost my most important box of stuff, and worn pajamas in public. Level 2 was shrinking out of view by the minute. Of course this was the moment Clive Villalobos chose to enter the room.

  “Halley, whateeslongweethjew?” he asked.

  “What?” I said.

  He managed to be intimidating while not being very tall, and every time I saw him I was surprised by how short he was. In that moment he looked a little scared.

  “Sorry,” I said, wiping snot on my arm. “I have the flu.”

  He tried not to notice this gross feminine display with the same visible disgust as if I’d just pulled a box of tampons out of my pocket and set it down in front of him. “Halley, eefjewareseekjewshouldbeeenbed. Govac tujor broomineye wheel sinnadoct oar.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Govac tujor broomineye wheel sinnadoct oar,” he repeated.

  “Go back to my room? I can’t, there’s too much to do.” I tried explaining about the lost box of stuff, but he cut me off.

  “Halley, goatabedbefoorjewmekevaeryoneseek.”

  “What?” I said.

  Clive stared at me.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “Celeste should be here soon.”

  Of course, if it had been Celeste managing this stuff instead of me, the package would have been delivered three days early by Brad Pitt covered in chocolate buttons. Perfect Celeste . . . now she would get the Level 2 job, and I would be stuck in Dayton forever. I started to tear up again.

  I handed Clive the utility knife, and he watched me slink off to the elevator. And for the rest of the afternoon, instead of holding pre-conference meetings with banquet managers and bellmen and audiovisual technicians and hotel managers, signing food and beverage orders, stuffing welcome packets, alphabetizing name badges, posting event signage, setting up the hospitality desk, monitoring the setup of staging and screens, greeting company managers as they arrived and attending to all the last-minute changes they wanted to make, Phil Collins and I sat in bed watching Telemundo while I called every copy shop in San Francisco. After a while, a local physician knocked on my hotel room door. He’d been sent by Clive, which could have been a nice gesture or could have been a hint that he didn’t want to run the meeting himself so I’d better get off my ass. The doctor quickly established that I had some kind of stomach virus. For the nausea he prescribed an injection, which he administered by smacking me swiftly and inexplicably on the behind and plunging the needle in. That day would go down in history as the day I got my first company-sponsored spanking.

  6

  I was well enough to manage the welcome dinner. The first catastrophe was Gus’s big entrance. Gus’s entrance was a major consideration for every sales meeting, as each year he tried to outdo the last. Unfortunately, during setup that afternoon, the glider he was supposed to fly in on got hit by a catering truck. On short notice we were able to find a donkey for him to ride in on instead, but he sulked about it for most of the evening. A donkey was not nearly as cool as a glider, despite the auspicious Jesus Christ reference.

  Then there was the heater incident.

  Our venue was a huge stucco chateau with an open courtyard in the center, sitting on a sixty-acre vineyard outside the city. The place had seventeen bedrooms, two kitchens, assorted sitting rooms, and a large banquet hall with a fireplace big enough to fit an average-sized man standing inside it, but there were over 400 people in my group, so the only space large enough to put them had been the courtyard. We’d strung a canopy of big white bulbs overhead to make it look festive. Flickering black lanterns hung from the sienna plaster walls, casting an ochre glow on the cobblestones. In the center, a huge blue and white ceramic-tiled fountain lined with glowing luminarias gurgled quietly. It would have been perfect except for the weather. It was cold. So we hired some propane heaters.

  We’d just taken our seats for dinner when I looked to my left and saw a drunk American sales rep with one of the heaters tilted sideways. The guy, whose name I couldn’t remember but I knew started with an S, rolled the heater slowly, almost dropping it, getting in the way of servers walking through to fill wine glasses and deliver starters. I put my napkin down, pushed my chair back, and walked over.

  “Hey there,” I said. “Would you mind not doing that?”

  “I’m cold,” he said.

  I put on my most sympathetic face. “Sorry, it’s just that you’ve already got a heater, and if you move this other one, then those people over there won’t get any heat, and it’ll block the servers.”

  He side-eyed his table and chuckled. “Have a cow, why don’t you?” he muttered, then reluctantly took his seat again.

  Gus glanced over at me nonchalantly, tonguing his tooth gap, and I briefly wondered how he was planning to judge me against C
eleste. Would he pick the nicer one? The more accommodating one? Or would he choose the one who was most in control?

  In my peripheral vision I saw a different guy get up to move the same heater as before. I waited a few seconds to see if he would really go for it. He did. I stood back up.

  “Hey, can you not do that?” I said. The guy was Max Bateman—a Level 3—one of our division’s up-and-coming marketing managers, known to everyone there as the guy who could get almost anything through a company expense report. Rumor had it he’d once expensed his best friend’s bachelor party at the Palomino Club in Las Vegas. He was in his late twenties with thick-lashed green eyes, and I felt his gravitational pull working on me, the allure of one of those ungraspable things I always found so irresistible. If I had met him in a bar, I probably would have made out with him.

  “Halley,” he slurred. “I’ve got it all under control.” He stopped and put a drunken arm over my shoulders.

  “Could you just do me a favor and leave it, Max? Please?”

  “I could,” he said, “but that wouldn’t be any fun.” He grinned.

  I wondered if they would ever respect me. This was the paradox of Level 1. As Service Staff, you were supposed to keep events like this running smoothly. But you had no authority to do it. Who were you to tell a Level 3 what to do? And yet, the only way to get promoted was to keep events like this running smoothly. When he tilted the big steel pole to the side, I could hear the propane inside sloshing around, imagined it spraying someone and the whole place burning down and people screaming and jumping from balconies. The headline in next month’s company newsletter would read “Service Staffer Kills Group in Heater-Related Fire.” I definitely wouldn’t be moving to France in that case.

  Max could see Gus looking over at him. He glanced sideways, made a face at one of his tablemates, and went back to his seat. Yep, he was definitely the type I would’ve made out with. He had a smirk that never quite left his mouth. He probably smirked in his sleep. I could picture him sitting in his college dorm room in a popped-collar polo, reading Atlas Shrugged, and congratulating himself for being awesome. Spending hours practicing the perfect firmness of handshake.

  I sat back down again. Table chatter buzzed away, a cacophony of intersecting monologues.

  “Oh yeah?” I heard a guy at the next table say. “What’s the weather like in Ireland this time of year?”

  The guy next to him, who was Irish, replied, “Did you see that game last night?”

  They had the shifty look of feral cats whose brains were encased behind a steel wall of distraction, waiting for their turn to talk in a game where the main objective was to fill every conversational pause with sound.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland,” the first guy said. “My mother’s side of the family are all from there. Dad’s side are mostly Welsh.”

  “Oh, is that right? That game was really something.”

  Soon the guy whose name started with S decided to try the heater-snatch again. I moved to intervene, merely out of principle. If I backed down now, my first two interventions would have been meaningless, and I’d never be taken seriously again.

  “We’re cold!” the one starting with S half-shouted at me. “It’s, like, five degrees out here.”

  Well it’s a good thing I’m a fucking wizard! I thought.

  I heard Celeste’s voice in my head. “We’re like ducks on a pond,” she always said, “kicking and kicking below the surface, but perfectly composed on top.”

  But it became a battle of wills. Max stood, presumably as a gesture of solidarity, but didn’t move. The one starting with S and I stared each other down. Other attendees stopped what they were doing just to witness this sudden test of his salesmanship skills. I got to play the role of the ridiculous micromanager who had to make an ordeal out of things as seemingly minor as heater placement, because none of them could fathom the deliberate precision that had gone into every detail of the experience they were currently complaining about. They wouldn’t notice that they had edible food in front of them and implements with which to eat it, and that it was served on an appealingly decorated table, at a venue where they had been dropped off by a large moving vehicle that would later pick them up, and that they didn’t have to pay for any of it. They wouldn’t notice that there were entertainers to entertain them, and bartenders to make them drinks, and someone watching over it all to make sure they didn’t do something stupid and inadvertently kill themselves. They would only notice the part that didn’t work, and then draw everyone else’s attention to it, ruining all the parts that were working in order to mold this one unsatisfactory aspect to their individual whims.

  When the guy whose name started with S went for the heater a final time, the frustration and embarrassment rose up through my toes and my legs, into my stomach, through my lungs and my rapidly beating heart, and into my face.

  I looked directly into his eyes and screamed, “Put it down! And don’t touch it again!”

  This was quite out of character for me and really unusual behavior for a Level 1. Everything went silent. Max chuckled quietly. The one starting with S looked at me like I was a raving lunatic.

  Once both guys sat down, I went back to my table, red-faced. Gus gave me a sulky look—clearly he was still upset about his unimpressive donkey entrance—and went back to his conversation. Jamie Aaronson approached.

  “Halley,” she said, “the president would like me to tell you how inappropriate that was.”

  I didn’t know what to say, but I wished for the day I had enough seniority to flip her the bird without consequence. “I’m sorry,” I replied.

  She cleared her throat. “I know you’re up for a Level 2 assignment, and you’re not going to get it acting like that. You need to work on being nicer.”

  Within minutes of the heater incident, a regional sales manager from Texas knelt down next to me, breath smelling like tequila and lime, and shouted in my ear, “Halley, come quick! The bar’s out of margaritas!”

  I went to the bar, and the managing bartender lifted his arms in resignation. He had no way of getting more tequila before the end of the event. I volunteered to drive to a store, since I had come to the winery by way of no-reverse rental car. On the back of a cocktail napkin, he drew me a picture of the route to the nearest supermarket. It appeared to be close by. As I jogged out to the car, keys in hand, two sales reps from Tennessee stopped me to say they were cold and ready to go. When would the buses be there?

  Every time you complain, God kills a puppy, I thought.

  Dinner was only halfway finished, and after dinner there would be a band, so the buses weren’t supposed to be there until ten o’clock. It was eight-thirty. But I told them I’d take care of it. The women wandered off to look around.

  I had almost made it to the car when the manager of the winery came running out, arms flailing.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me!” he shouted after me. He had an impressive unibrow that rose and fell as he shouted.

  “Miguel?” I said, turning toward him.

  “The gate.” He pointed behind us, panting. “It’s locked.”

  “Okay . . .” I said.

  He gestured for me to follow him. A margarita-shaped clock ticked in my mind, but I walked with him back up the dirt path to the entrance. He carried a flashlight to light the ground in front of us. Instead of going through the archway to the courtyard, we walked around the side of the house where there was another archway, blocked by a wrought iron gate. It was so quiet. The party noise was a distant chorus, a cricket song. I wanted to curl up and hide in that darkness and never go back.

  “Here, see? Someone closed it,” Miguel said, pointing to the gate.

  “Someone from my group?”

  He nodded. “This gate has to stay open. It’s an emergency exit.”

  I had no idea why any of my attendees would be all the way ove
r here in the first place, or why they would fiddle with a gate. It was one of those unsolvable mysteries of the universe. The mystery of the phantom gate-closer.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Miguel. “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

  He nodded, and we walked back around to the front where I sprinted to my car before anyone could ask me any more questions.

  I followed the bartender’s napkin map through the starlit countryside, dialed the lead motor coach driver from my cell phone, and simultaneously imagined all sorts of terrible things going wrong at the winery during my absence. The driver picked up on the fourth ring.

  “Eric?” I said.