Rousseau ate silently and listened to the conversation. He glanced at me a couple times with a puzzled expression, as if he was trying to place me.
“Is that on La Rambla?” they continued.
“I don’t know, I’ve only been there once.”
“It’s near the seaside. Barceloneta.”
“Oh yeah. I stayed in the W Hotel over there once.”
“They have a nice rooftop bar.”
“The best rooftop bar is in Athens. You can see all the way to the Colosseum.”
“I think you mean the Acropolis.”
“Yes, that’s right. The Acropolis.”
“I love Greek food.”
A couple people got up to replenish their mixed drinks at the bar. Gus shouted to Rousseau from across the table. “Hey, Frog. How was your flight?”
Rousseau smiled. “Who’re you calling Frog? Don’t you know who I am?”
Gus licked his teeth. “Are you feeling the jet lag or are you going to party with us tonight?”
“We’ll see,” Rousseau said.
“Well, man is not a camel,” Gus said, signaling the waiter for another glass of wine. He revived the tapas discussion.
Rousseau didn’t say much to anyone else, but he didn’t seem shy or uncomfortable either. His silence filled me with anticipation. I glanced over as he accidentally flung a chunk of chicken off his plate onto the tablecloth. He reached over and retrieved it absentmindedly and set it on a cocktail napkin. His hands were beautiful and clean.
He looked at me and said, “You saw that, right?”
I laughed obligingly.
“Just making sure you’re paying attention,” he said, straight-faced.
I looked sideways at him, and he watched me for a few long seconds. I was back in high school, and he was that impossibly cool guy. Reality seemed to pass through him and come out bigger, as if he breathed another air. I wanted to stare at him until I detected all of his flaws.
From the next table we overheard Lauren Miller utter the phrase “thinking about taking a tapeworm.”
“I don’t know why more people don’t do it,” she said.
“I did that lemonade cleanse, and it totally worked,” the woman next to her said. “I mean, I had a headache for a while, but I think that’s normal. It went away after a few days.”
“I started a fast last week,” another woman chimed in. “I can’t eat any food for nine days, and I can only drink my own urine.”
She was, in fact, drinking a glass of yellowish liquid. The table went silent for a few seconds.
“I’m telling you, a tapeworm is the way to go,” Lauren said.
Rousseau looked at me as if we were in cahoots. “When she ends up with a wicked case of neurocysticercosis,” he said, “I know a good neurologist.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I laughed anyway. The idea of someone being in cahoots with me, a Level 1, was significant. My own family was not in cahoots with me. Celeste was really the only one. Maybe Darren too. We were always on one side of the desk while our “guests” remained on the other side. It was a rare thing indeed for one of them to voluntarily cross over to our side. Especially someone like Thomas Rousseau.
“I . . . thought you were French,” I said, then felt stupid for saying it.
“I live in Paris,” he said. “Hence the frog jokes.”
“But you don’t have an accent.”
He took another bite. “My mother was American. My father was French. I was born in Dayton.”
“You were born in Dayton? As in, Dayton, Ohio?” It couldn’t be. Dayton was where people like me were born. Exciting people came from somewhere else.
Rousseau finished chewing. “Yes, Dayton, Ohio. That’s how I got connected to Findlay.”
“So . . . how did you get out? I’ve been trying for years.”
He laughed. “My family moved to Paris when I was sixteen, to be closer to my grandparents.”
This was a marvel to me. Suddenly I wanted to know everything about him, what it was like for him in Dayton, how it felt to leave, how he’d become president of his company, what Paris was like, whether he’d found happiness.
Beautiful chocolate desserts—molded layers of mousse and ganache—appeared in front of us. I was too nervous to eat, so I pushed the dessert away. Rousseau looked back at me again. “Do you ever get tired of traveling with these people?”
“Why? Do I look tired?”
“I just meant,” he said, taking up his spoon. “I can see you’re not a salesperson.”
“Oh. No, I’m service staff.” I hated saying it, revealing the filth of my caste. Surely it would change his impression of me. But he didn’t seem affected.
“Ever think about doing something else? Surely there are other jobs that would get you out of Dayton.”
“Well, I almost joined the Peace Corps after college,” I said.
He took a bite of chocolate as the espressos and the ports were delivered. “Why didn’t you?”
“One of my best friends. He joined a year earlier and got assigned to Uganda. He kept in touch by email the whole time, and one day he sent a picture of this humongous snake he killed outside the hut he was living in.” I stopped, assuming the rest of the story was self-evident.
Rousseau leaned forward. “And . . .”
“And it was a huge snake! Like, six feet long.”
“You didn’t join the Peace Corps because of a snake?” He smiled.
“Yeah I’m terrified of snakes. I don’t even like seeing them on TV.”
“Sounds Freudian.”
I took a sip of port. “I never thought about it that way. I’ll have to stop telling people that story.”
He laughed and wiped his face with a napkin. “Well at least you get to travel a bit with this job anyway. Do you ever make it over to Europe?”
“No. But I’m up for a position in France. I’ll find out at the end of this meeting if I’ve gotten it.”
“Oh, I hope you do,” he said.
I reddened. “Really?”
“Yeah. You’ll like it there.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding. He was just being nice. “I hope so.”
“I’ve lived in Paris for twenty years, and I still love it. In Paris ugliness is beautiful. The simplest food is the best you’ve ever eaten. At least once a day you see someone totally captivating and something about them stays with you and follows you around . . . and then eventually you realize it’s Paris.”
I paused for a moment to let the words settle in, turning them over in my head. “It sounds perfect.”
“Being an expat changes everything though. I never really felt like I fit in in Dayton, and I thought going to France would fix it. But what I eventually found was that I wasn’t quite French, and I wasn’t quite American anymore either. I was something in between.”
He looked over at me, and a tiny glimmer of connection passed between us like an electrical charge.
“But, you carve your own space,” he said, turning back to the remnants of his dessert. “Right?”
I thought about that for a while. I’d always believed that a place existed somewhere in the world that was exactly right for me, someplace where I belonged. I just needed to find it. It had never occurred to me that this might not be the case, and I didn’t quite believe it.
“No, I actually enjoy a good sneeze,” Gus said loudly, and the others erupted in laughter. I had stopped paying attention to the table chatter and had no idea what he was talking about. The company president, Anthony Kale, came up behind Rousseau and put a hand on his shoulder, which startled Rousseau so violently that he shouted and involuntarily tossed his napkin in the air, causing me to choke on the water I was drinking.
“Thomas, glad you made it.” Anthony thrust his hand forward and Rousseau sho
ok it obligingly. “We are really looking forward to your lecture tomorrow.”
“Thank you. I’m glad to be here,” Rousseau said. “How are Annabella and the kids?”
“They’re fine. Please pass our regards on to Chloe.”
“I’ll do that,” he said.
I glanced down and noticed the silver band on Rousseau’s finger. So he was married. And yet whatever real life he had outside of this place didn’t seem fully real to me. In that moment, this room seemed to contain the entirety of the universe.
I was still coughing when Anthony paused to scowl at me meaningfully. Findlay had a “no fraternization with clients” policy, and his look said I’d better keep it professional. He walked away.
“My god, he came out of nowhere!” Rousseau whispered. “Like a ninja.”
I smiled at him and was silent.
“So, where were we?” he said.
“I don’t remember.” I took another drink of wine and tried to think of something impersonal and benign to talk about. “Are you related to Rousseau, the philosopher?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably somewhere down the line. What was his shtick again?”
“I think he talked about goodness existing in nature. That it was the decadence of society that corrupted people. Right?”
“Don’t ask me.” He poured himself more wine and passed the bottle over to me, diluting my port with Syrah. I didn’t mind.
“Don’t you have a PhD or something?” I said, taking a sip.
“Yes, but I try not to think too much. You know, Pythagoras wouldn’t eat beans because he thought they had souls.”
“Okay, well I’m not sitting alone in the dark collecting urine in jars or anything.”
“That’s lucky for you. If you did you’d probably be talking to that woman over there instead of me.”
I smiled.
“But I want to hear more about the Peace Corps,” he said. “It’s such a different path than corporate work; I’m trying to figure out what drew you to it.”
“I don’t know, I thought for a while it might be where I belonged.” I paused for a second to think about how to say what I meant, so thoroughly conscious of every feeling. Anxiety, elation, stomach-churning admiration. I experienced every thought twice: once from inside my head, and once from outside looking down at myself in judgment. Time seemed to move too slowly and too quickly at the same time. “I’m always looking for it,” I said. “Sometimes I’m not really sure what it is. A place, maybe. Or a person . . . That probably sounds stupid.”
“I don’t think so. We’re all looking for it.”
Tiny points of connection. What was it, exactly? His sense of humor? His penetrating, understanding eyes? Or was it something more mystical than that, part of some unobservable category of human experience that defies comprehension? All I can really say is that in that world, where most people passed one another without really seeing, he saw me. And it happened almost immediately, which was the first time anything like that had ever happened to me.
Others gradually moved onto the dance floor or trickled out to the terrace, and we were left among empty plates, wadded up napkins, half-drunk glasses of wine. Gus gave me a warning glance when he left the table, and I reminded myself to keep it all in check. But I didn’t walk away. Rousseau and I talked and talked, about travel and getting out of Dayton, about family, and Findlay lore. Eventually, we walked out to the terrace, and he sat next to me on a padded bench. The night started to shimmer, and in a disappearing cloud of spicy cigar smoke I tilted my head back and looked at the stars. We never faced each other, only sat like that, side by side in the thoughtful velvet dark, unspeaking, as if words would have burst that evanescent yolk of happiness that descends upon my kind so rarely.
10
I tried to hold on to that feeling, but by morning it’d faded away with the wine buzz. Getting back to business as usual—proving myself when, just last night, for a couple hours, I’d been enough—felt tedious and wrong. I rose from my hotel bed at 5:30 a.m. and stood naked and hungover in front of the mirror. What was in this body? Why did it have to be so hungry for everything in the world? I looked over at Phil Collins. He didn’t seem to have the answer either.
The shower was hot and relentless. I’d entered that stage of exhaustion where everything starts moving in slow motion, floating. I watched the water fall in thick lines down my abdomen. Steam drifted and curled around the ceiling’s recessed light. I felt like laughing and crying at the same time, and suddenly I wanted to leap out of my skin, to kick loose the weakness and take control of myself. I wanted to feel solid and strong, but I craved resignation.
The lobby was still dim when I stepped out of the elevator. Outside the sky was dark. It was the most quiet time of day, that hour after the late-night drinkers have gone to bed and before the nine-to-fivers get up for work. In hotels it is especially quiet at that time. The heels of my shoes clicking on the marble floor echoed in the silence. I didn’t meet another person on my way to the meeting room, not even hotel staff, and it gave me the gratifying and also frighteningly post-apocalyptic sense that I was the only one left.
I walked along the thinly carpeted corridor that had already become so familiar. Flipped on the lights. The meeting room was cavernous and cold. It looked chintzy without any people in it, painted white and gold with an elaborately patterned carpet. Hotel housekeepers had come through during the night and removed candy wrappers and empty water bottles from the tables. I walked down the rows and straightened chairs, enveloped in solitude that felt as infinite as death.
I sat at the hospitality desk, checked my email, and waited for the first attendees to arrive for breakfast. I envied them, being the recipients of the hospitality instead of the provider of the hospitality. Waking up stress-free, maybe a little annoyed at having to listen to lectures all day, bumbling downstairs and eating breakfast without a care. Rousseau would deliver his lecture later that morning, and I sent him a reminder about the room location. I was surprised to see his response, half-expecting the entire previous night to have been a dream.
“I knew it,” he wrote. “You’re one of those people.”
“What people?”
“The ones who get up at 5:00 a.m.”
“Well someone has to manage things around here. We wouldn’t want Jamie’s coffee to be late.”
“See you in a minute,” he said.
His words were birds flying through me.
Gus passed the hospitality desk wordlessly on his way into the meeting room to get mic’d up for the first session. From my seat I heard the audiovisual tech start the sound check. I watched hotel banquet staff remove lids and plastic wrap from fruit trays and chafing dishes of scrambled eggs and bacon. The hallway started coming to life.
Crowds soon gathered around coffee stations, filling breakfast plates, filing in and out of restrooms. I stayed behind the desk to answer questions. Rousseau stepped off the elevator, flanked by three sales managers all trying to keep his attention. He passed my desk in a cloud of prestige, looked into my eyes and said, “Hey.” His eyes slightly wrinkled at the corners, as if we were in on the same secret. If my insides could melt and flow like candle wax from my pores, in that moment, they would have.
Gus walked up to my desk, adjusting the lavalier on his lapel. “Halley,” he said, “can you and Celeste sit in on this next session? We’re going to talk about the Tantalus, and it might be a good lecture for you two to hear.”
“Sure,” I said.
I picked up the phone to dial Celeste, but she stepped off the elevator before the line started ringing. Gus drifted back through the meeting room doors, and I motioned for Celeste to follow. We grabbed cups of coffee, Celeste’s black and mine with a generous amount of half-and-half and a sprinkle of cinnamon, and took seats in the back. It was a packed house, hundreds of stars hovering in a vast sola
r system. Their energies were different colors. Different shapes, different sizes. That’s how existence felt to me. Those I knew rose in the sky, became bigger. The Celestes were orange glowing orbs, the Clives, ultramarine supernovas. There were all manner of lesser constellations, some barely visible, like bit parts in a movie, the kind that seemed to evaporate into nothingness when they walked off the screen. But Rousseau was the center. He blazed with a brilliance that eclipsed the sun. If his spirit could have a form and a face, it would have been the size of the building in which we stood. Of course it couldn’t, and it didn’t; our minds and hearts would remain hidden inside these bodies. You never see the magnitude of a soul. You only get some vague idea of it.
Gus walked on stage to some booming classic rock tune he’d chosen. He was manic and giddy, snapping his fingers to the music and basking in every invisible wave of energy and attention radiating in his direction. The A/V tech faded the entrance music and the room applauded. Whether we were clapping for what had just happened or for what was to come, I couldn’t rightly say.
“Now,” Gus began, never quite making eye contact, “I’m going to introduce you to an exciting new product. You’ll learn more about it when we officially launch next year, but I’ll give you a taste now so you know what’s coming.”
The audience leaned forward, eager to leap over the barrier separating us from our cult leader who would deliver us from mediocrity. We were on a mission to change the world, and Gus’s sheer magnetism assured us that the promise of greatness was out there, a butterfly we could catch as long as we had the right net.
A spotlight followed him as he walked back and forth across the stage. “I’m going to start with a little story,” he said. “Once upon a time there were two business executives. Let’s call them Jim Crook and Biff Crazos.”
His pause indicated we should laugh, and we obeyed.
“Their business model is top-down: they create products they and their engineers determine are useful, and then put those products on the market for anyone who is interested in buying. They do a fair amount of research, of course: they pull together focus groups, they test concepts and conduct competitive analyses. But in the end, they rely mostly on the capacity of their team to innovate, and they also rely on the consumer to notice their product in the marketplace and buy it.
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