The Insatiables

by Brittany Terwilliger

  “I have been so nervous,” I confessed, “wondering how to read you.”

  “You make me nervous too, but in a good way,” he replied. “I was so depressed the day I left San Francisco. I know it’s not ideal, and I don’t want to get you in trouble, but I hope we can keep talking.”

  “Of course,” I said. I would slay dragons to keep talking to him. He made me feel, for the first time, as if I’d transcended ordinary life.

  17

  We finally got through the long-winded introductory welcomes, the thank-yous for dialing in, and the managerial “allow me to say a few words” portion of our first conference call and got down to business.

  “Maybe we could make it rocket-themed,” Max said. “You know, like an actual launch. And we could set off a rocket at DEVO.”

  DEVO was short for Device Expo—the largest devices trade show in the world, where we would launch the Tantalus in January. Launching at a big trade show was a strategic move, guaranteeing us a captive audience of our most important customers.

  “I don’t think they’ll let us set off a rocket at DEVO,” I said. “In fact, no more ideas involving fire.”

  “What if we curtain off part of the booth and have sound effects like people are building something?” Chad Johnson, one of the brand managers, said. “Everyone will be wondering, ‘What’s Findlay building in there?’ Then we unveil it.”

  “But what are we going to unveil?” Max asked.

  “The device—the Tantalus,” Chad said, as if this should be obvious.

  Max cleared his throat condescendingly. “Well, it’s awfully small. That seems kind of gimmicky. Won’t it look weird if we pull back the curtain after all that jackhammering, and all that’s sitting there is this little Tantalus?”

  “Oh, but setting off rockets isn’t gimmicky?”

  “What if we get Gus to jump out of a giant cake?” Molly squealed.

  No one spoke for a moment, as, I assume, we were all picturing this in our heads.

  “There is no way in hell he would do that,” Max said. “But you could jump out of a cake, Molly.” Max snickered in a way that made all of us want to join whatever team he was on.

  “I would do it. I’d jump out of a cake,” Molly replied. “Put it on the list, Halley.”

  I did not put it on the list.

  “Okay,” Max said, “how about a champagne toast? Halley, can we get those guys who cut the corks off with swords?”

  “No swords,” I said. “No weapons in the trade show hall. No loud noises, no banners hung from the ceiling, no roving signage, no outside catering, no activity outside the booth footprint. You know the rules, Max. They can’t give any exhibitors an unfair advantage.”

  “Maybe we should get Gus to give a speech!” said Molly.

  “Yes, I have that on the list. But we still need a theme,” I said, attempting to bring the conversation back around. “The graphics, logos, print pieces and the booth design are all going to incorporate the theme, so let’s establish that first.”

  No one said anything.

  “It would help if we knew exactly how the Tantalus works,” Chad said. “Are they ever going to give us this ‘proprietary information’ Gus keeps mentioning?”

  “We’re not engineering the Tantalus here, we’re just selling it,” Max said. “We have enough information. We know it’s cutting edge new technology that reveals what people want most. What more do we need to know?”

  “And state of the art,” added James Blakely, the new brand manager who’d just replaced Baldwin Frank. “It’s going to revolutionize consumerism.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So, cutting edge, state of the art. Visually, I’m thinking . . . black . . . metal.”

  “A camera,” someone said.

  “Mechanical parts,” someone else said. “An engine.”

  “A Ferrari.”

  “Guns?”

  “Airplanes.”

  “Ozzy Osbourne.”

  I didn’t even know who was talking anymore. I left the phone on speaker and got up from my dining room table to pour myself another glass of wine.

  “Killer whales!” That one came from Molly.

  “A clock,” I said.

  “Black widow spiders!”

  “Wait a minute,” James said. “Whoever said clock, I like that.”

  “I was thinking about a digital alarm clock,” I said. “Like what you’d see on the side of a ticking time bomb.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Like a countdown clock,” I said.

  “Yeah . . . I like that,” James said, trailing off.

  “We could use it to generate buzz,” I said. “Picture just a clock, counting down. But no explanation. No one will know what it means; they’ll just see the date and time of the launch. So they’ll know something is about to happen when the countdown gets to zero . . . something big . . . they just won’t know what.”

  “Do we know what?” Max said. “What are we counting down to?”

  “The launch.”

  “Well yeah,” he said, “but something has to happen.”

  “We could set off fireworks,” Chad said.

  “Not allowed,” I replied.

  “Not even little ones? I think they allow little ones.”

  “I’ll find out.” I put it on the list. Little fireworks.

  “What if we fabricated a giant model of the Tantalus and put it in the middle of the booth,” I said. “Then we could do the unveiling thing like Chad suggested.”

  “Sounds gimmicky,” Max said.

  “What if we got people to wear T-shirts with the countdown programmed into them on a timer?” I said. “Then when the clock hit zero, they’d all break into dance, like a flash mob.”

  “Where would we get these people?” James said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They could be anyone. We could even recruit people off the street.”

  “Great,” Chad chimed in, “some French hobo is going to be walking around in a Tantalus shirt.”

  “That’s going to damage our brand,” James said.

  “We could always hire a streaker,” I said. “That would get everyone’s attention.”

  That one may have been the wine talking.

  “Molly,” I said, “do you think you could get the designer to mock up some countdown clock images and get them to all of us in the next couple weeks?”

  “I’ll have to run it by Gus, Halley,” she said, clearly irritated that we didn’t choose her killer whale idea. “Or, maybe I should let you run it by him, since the two of you are so . . . close.” She chuckled for good measure, and everyone else was uncomfortably silent.

  “Sure, I can check with him,” I said, pretending I didn’t know what she meant.

  18

  We passed our time in a blur of unproductive meetings. We met over meals and wine. We got many detailed accounts of the harm Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos might inflict on Gus in the future and why they were not to be trusted.

  On a Wednesday Gus asked me to meet him for lunch at the clubhouse. The Mediterranean air was warm on the terrace. If you looked past the golf course and its perimeter of pale condos you could see a slice of bright blue sea in the distance. By noon the pastel polos and Bermuda shorts filled every table.

  Gus and I both ordered the caprese sandwich, mostly because we liked the channel-cut fries. I had begun to memorize the necessary French restaurant phrases—Une table pour deux (Table for two). L’addition s’il vous plait (Check, please). Un verre de vin blanc pour moi, merci (A glass of white wine for me, thanks)—while Gus thought that if he just spoke English with a French accent it was the same as speaking French. The waiters already knew that he took his Coke Light with ice and no lemon and that I liked Dijon mustard with my fries, so we didn’t need to say much anyway.

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nbsp; Gus looked perturbed. “Lauren is having cat problems,” he said, gleeking a tiny spurt of Coke Light through his tooth gap.

  “That gray cat?”

  He sucked down the last few drops of his drink and waved to the waiter for a refill. “Do you think maybe it’s a spy cat?”

  I coughed to keep myself from laughing. “What’s a spy cat?”

  “I was just thinking that thing that looks like a growth on the side of its face might not be a growth at all. Maybe Cook and Bezos implanted a camera in there,” he said, stony-faced.

  “I don’t know. That seems . . . extreme,” I said.

  “These guys are ruthless. They even got to my wife. Why do you think I got divorced?”

  “You divorced your wife because of Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos?”

  “I divorced my wife because she was a spy. Like that cat.”

  Our food arrived. “Bon appétit,” the waiter said casually. Gus opened a little glass bottle of ketchup and reached for his knife.

  I forked a fry and dipped it in mustard. “I think the cat was here before we got here. I’ve mentioned it to Fleur in the property management office a few times. She said they keep the cats around to control the mice.”

  “Well, I told Darren to keep an extra close watch on The Backpack just in case.”

  Gus’s knife made a pinging sound as he thrust it in and out of the ketchup bottle.

  My phone beeped, and I paused to check it. A text from Rousseau. “Wish you were here,” he said.

  “Stop teasing me,” I typed back. “I’m at lunch with Gus.”

  Gus held a corner of his sandwich, ready to take a bite. “How about Paris, the launch? Everything going okay?”

  I silenced my phone and shoved it back in my pocket. “Well,” I said, “it’s hard to get anything done when everyone has to agree.”

  Gus cleared his throat. “That’s part of being a good manager, Halley,” he said.

  I stared at my plate. “That’s the thing though. I’m not actually a manager. I’m only a Level 2. I’m more like . . . a notetaker. I can’t force people to agree, but I also can’t make any decisions.”

  “Well,” he said, waving to the waiter for another Coke Light, “I’ll leave it to your judgment. But you’re responsible for outcomes, so you’re going to have to find a way to do what needs to be done. Don’t let us down.”

  It was the kind of advice that wasn’t helpful at all. I didn’t say anything. The sun burned hotly on the back of my neck; I’d been afraid to attempt a trip to a French pharmacy, so I didn’t have any sunscreen.

  Gus held his sandwich up as if he was speaking into a microphone. “Halley, let me tell you something. You are going places. If you can make this project a success, you’ll move right up the Findlay ladder, I promise you that. You’ll be a manager in no time.”

  It was like he knew exactly what I wanted, exactly what I needed to hear.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Really.” He took another bite of his sandwich. “So I know you’ll do whatever you have to do to be successful.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Good. Now, I’ve decided I want to give the speech at the launch event in the booth. This is my project and I want to be the one to roll it out. So put me on the agenda for the launch event.”

  “Okay.” I wrote it in my binder.

  His phone rang. He glanced at the number, then jumped out of his chair. “Gotta go,” he said, tossing his napkin on the seat. “Do you mind signing the check?”

  “Okay.”

  He activated the phone, and I heard him whisper “ciao bella” into the mouthpiece. I waited for the bill and wondered what that was all about.

  I checked to see if my own phone bore a reply from Rousseau. It did. There on the screen: “Come on. Just let me be in love with you.”

  I tucked the phone back into my pocket, slightly more gently this time, as if it had become an avatar of him. As if he was secretly mine.

  We all took seats in Gus’s living room. He set a new pack of our favorite Speculoos cookies on the coffee table, and we tore into them as if we hadn’t just eaten a few minutes ago.

  “Max, you go first,” Gus said over the cellophane din.

  “Thanks, Gus,” Max said. “I’m going to Brussels for a couple days, then to London, and then to Berlin. I’ll be meeting with sales managers. I leave on Sunday.”

  Lauren looked at Max with a sly half-smile and bit into a cookie. “I’m going too,” she said.

  Max snickered. “That’s right, I almost forgot. Lauren is coming.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  Darren looked up from his binder. “While you’re in Brussels, Max, could you drop in on Simon Phloss? Gus and I spoke with him yesterday and he has some ideas that might help us with the sales training. I started working on the—”

  “Darren, my boy,” Gus said, “would you mind getting us some wine? I could really use a glass.”

  Darren hopped out of his seat, put his binder down, and jogged away to the kitchen. We heard the opening and closing of cabinet doors, the thunk of the wine bottle uncorking, the thwash of the pour.

  Gus leaned back in his chair. “Okay, Lauren, do you have anything to add?”

  “Well, while we’re traveling I’m meeting with product managers to get some help understanding the data, so I can incorporate it into the sales training.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Gus said.

  Darren returned with glasses of wine for everyone.

  Gus looked up. “Darren, do you mind grabbing the napkins?”

  “Yeah, I was just about to do that,” Darren said. He disappeared again and returned with a stack of white cloth napkins.

  Gus sipped his wine. “Okay, Halley, what’s happening with you?”

  “I’m still trying to establish the theme, then I’ll start working on the booth.”

  “Why are we getting a booth?” Lauren asked. “Shouldn’t we have a pavilion?”

  “They don’t have pavilions at DEVO,” I said.

  Max straightened. “Maybe they can construct one for us. Find out if they can build us one.”

  I made a note in my binder.

  “How many podium talks are they giving us?” Gus asked.

  “None,” I said. “They’re giving us a luncheon symposium.”

  Gus clicked his tongue. “No,” he said, “we want podium talks. At least two.”

  “Two?” Max jumped in. “I think we should get six. We have a lot to present.”

  “Yes, six,” Gus said.

  I made a note.

  “I have a question,” Max said. “Can we put the launch meeting at a Hilton? I’d like to get the points.”

  I made a note.

  19

  “I don’t like the countdown clock idea,” Chad said.

  “I don’t either,” Max added.

  We were on our third group conference call, and still no launch theme. Whatever idea we came up with, someone didn’t like it. Max didn’t like any idea that wasn’t his.

  I sighed. “Maybe instead of focusing on the newness of the technology, we should tie the theme to what the technology does. What do you think?”

  “So, something aspirational?” Chad asked. “Tantalus is making dreams come true, it’s giving people what they want most . . . that sort of thing?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What if, at the launch, we staged one of those paper lantern shows?” Max said. “I’ve seen them in Vegas; you’re supposed to make a wish and set the lantern on fire and it floats up into the sky.”

  “Great,” Chad said. “Drunk people and fire. Good idea, Max.”

  “Thanks,” Max said.

  “We can’t light things on fire at DEVO,” I said. “But I’ll put it on the list for the gala.”

>   “Why don’t we just make it French-themed and plaster pictures of the launch team all over the booth,” Chad said, chuckling. “You’re living the dream, right? I’m surprised you came back from the beach long enough to take this call.”

  “Don’t make me fire your ass,” Max said. “Unless you’d rather go collect unemployment with Baldwin.”

  “Whatever, Bateman, I don’t report to you. Besides, I was just kidding.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s keep thinking. Wishes. Dreams. Findlay is giving you everything you’ve ever wanted. What comes to mind?”

  “Rainbows!” Molly said.

  “Ferraris.”

  “Princesses!”

  “Sleep.”

  “Castles!”

  “Sex.”

  “Money.”

  “Disney!”

  “What if we hire an illusionist?” James said.

  “To do what?” Max grumbled. “What do illusions have to do with dreams?”

  “You know, dreams, magic, magicians . . .” James trailed off. “No?”

  We ended the call exactly as we’d started it: without a theme.

  I got up from my chair and crossed the cold tile in bare feet to move a load of soggy laundry from the washing machine to the dryer, then poured myself a glass of water and looked at the clock. 6 p.m. At least the logistics of the launch were in motion. There would be a trade show booth where we would showcase the Tantalus and stage the launch, a gala to entertain our most important clients, a luncheon symposium with expert testimonials about Tantalus’s features and benefits, multiple dinners to meet with clients one-on-one, six sponsored lectures in the conference general session, a sales meeting to get the reps fired up to sell, and an array of banners, media spots, and advertisements. All I needed to do now was book the gala space, contract the hotel for the sales meeting, send a save-the-date to the audiovisual company, line up a motor coach vendor, and get everyone to settle on a theme. And then I could start working on the details.

  I sat back down at my computer and scrolled through emails. I was beginning to develop a love-hate relationship with working from home. Sure, I could go multiple days without wearing pants. But, no office was more unrelenting than my condo. No manager was more implacable than the voice inside my head. You’re not good enough, the voice whispered. You’re not working hard enough. You’re a fraud. They’re all going to find out you’re a fraud. It didn’t help that people back in the Dayton office bellyached about our team in Biot, supposedly sunbathing and living large on Findlay’s dime. When you’re a Level 1, you imagine that they’ll applaud your success when you get to Level 2, that they’ll finally respect you. But instead, they go from barely noticing you to hating you. Because now you’re a threat. Now you have something they want.