I looked at her meaningfully, and for a second it was just like it used to be, us against the world. God, I’d missed that. As if she could feel the air between us softening, Celeste’s eyes went dark again, and the moment passed.
“Alec is going to put up some old graphics he has on hand,” I said.
“The brand managers are going to flip out.”
“There was literally nothing else I could do.”
Celeste cracked a tiny, cruel smile.
It was noon and we had just enough time to grab a bite to eat before our next meeting. Across the Boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr was a small bistro. The tables were lined with paper and reminded me of the pizza place where Rousseau and I had gone in Cannes. Where we’d sat in the sun, watching boats bobbing in the marina, talking about the brilliant future that was surely waiting for us just around the bend. The sunshine of the memory made me forget, for a second, where I was, as if Rousseau’s ghost had just sat down at the table across from me. It had been weeks since our fight, since the night he said goodbye, and in some inexplicable way it simultaneously felt like years had passed since then, and also like it had only happened minutes ago. I’d found a way to push it all down deep, but in that quiet inner place I was still raw and heartbroken and furious. I wondered how he could have loved me if it was so easy for him to walk away. I still caught myself ruminating about what we could have done differently, about what he’d meant when he said, “what if the only way to preserve this is to end it,” about what I would feel and say and do when I saw him again. For certain he would be here, would attend DEVO and our launch events—we still had him scheduled to give a podium talk on the last day—and I would see him. Any minute now, I might see him. The thought of it sucked the air out of me.
Celeste, Grace, Marion, and I filed over to a table next to the window, and a waiter handed us black leather menus.
“Do you have one in English?” Celeste asked.
“Non,” he almost-shouted and walked away. I smiled at her, and she glared back at me. If it hadn’t been for me, she would have been the one who could read a French menu and understand basic French phrases. By now she would have been accustomed to all the trappings of daily French life. She would be “cultured.” To her outsider’s eye, it must have looked like I was living the life she’d always wanted. She couldn’t have known what difficulties and humiliations she would’ve gone through to get here. Like finding a beautiful canyon cut through rock, all she could see was the resulting vista, not the time and the destruction that had formed it.
I wanted to explain everything to her, to take her hand and talk the way we used to talk. But this wasn’t the place for a conversation like that. It would have to wait.
32
Clive was the first of the managers to walk through the five-way revolving door, pointy-toed shoes clip-clopping across the hotel’s vast lobby. He came toward me for the customary double-cheek kiss, but he went left and I went right and our lips touched in the middle for one brief and unbearably awkward millisecond. His eyes widened, then he turned around wordlessly and pulled his suitcase down the hallway to the reception desk.
“Sorry,” I said to his back. I felt the memory of his aftershave sticking to my face, and wiped at it with my sleeve. Yuck.
Marion and I waited to greet the other early-arrivers, listening to voices in various accents echoing off the creamy granite hotel floor. Balding businessmen sat on light gray sofas and drank tiny cups of coffee. They spoke softly into phones, hunched close to one another in conversation, talking with their hands. I scrolled through my phone for emails, glancing up every few seconds to browse the faces for Rousseau. Everyone looked a little familiar, in that strange way they start to do when you’ve traveled enough to have seen every possible shape of human mouth and nose and eye. Each new face is just a rearrangement.
A limo deposited Max, Lauren, Darren, and Gus on the street out front. Gus looked pale and sick. He let the others go ahead toward the reception desk, escorted by Marion, while he pulled me aside to tell me the airline had lost his luggage.
“I’ll get Marion to keep an eye on it,” I said. “Were they able to tell you what flight they put it on?”
He wiped his hands against the sides of his pants. “No, you don’t understand. The airline couldn’t find it at all. It’s a nightmare. Just a nightmare. What am I going to do without my stuff? Also, there’s some medication in that bag I’m going to need tonight.”
“What is it?”
“Prozac. I have to have it. You don’t want me to be a dizzy wreck when I’m up there making the launch announcement in the booth. Can you call my doctor’s office back in Dayton and get them to send an extra bottle? Darren has the phone number.”
“Sure,” I said. “But even if they send it right away, the earliest I think we could have it is the day after tomorrow.”
He gave me a look.
“I’ll make it happen,” I said.
I walked him to the check-in desk and told the receptionist that one of our VIP guests had lost his luggage. The receptionist produced a bag of toiletries from under the desk, which Gus accepted glumly. Then she summoned a guest services manager to go out and buy Gus some clothes.
I pushed the talk button on my radio. “Celeste, come in.”
“This is Celeste,” she said.
“Who do we know coming to this meeting that might have Prozac?”
“Jamie takes Prozac,” she said.
“Perfect,” I replied. She would be on the company plane with Anthony.
“I understand, Halley,” Jamie said, “but I brought the exact number of pills I need for this trip. So if I give you Sunday, then what am I supposed to take on Sunday?”
I’d forgotten how loud her normal speaking voice was. People seated in the lobby atrium craned their necks to look at us.
“I’ve already ordered another bottle to be sent from the States,” I said. I tried compensating for her loudness by speaking extra quietly, but instead of taking the hint she squinted irritably and shouted, “What?”
“The new bottle of pills will be here tomorrow,” I said. “So I can replenish you then.”
She tapped her foot against her suitcase. “Are you sure? What if it gets lost in transit?”
“I’m tracking it. If it gets lost, there’ll still be time to ship another bottle.”
She reluctantly handed over the pill and watched it fall to the floor as it changed hands.
“Shit,” I said, scrambling to pick it up as it rolled out of sight.
“I’m not giving you another one,” she said, and walked away.
I dropped to my hands and knees and began to search.
“Puis-je vous aider?” the bellman said.
“I dropped a little green pill,” I said. “We have to find it before someone steps on it.”
The bellman dropped to his hands and knees too. We focused our eyes on the floor, which was not as clean up close as it appeared to be from a standing position.
“What are you doing?” a man said.
I looked up and into the eyes of the company president. Anthony looked down at me with the amused, good-natured expression of a person with whom no one ever disagrees.
“I dropped something,” I said, annoyed at myself for not being ready for him. I stood quickly and switched back to greeter mode. “How was your flight?”
“Fine,” he said. His wife Annabella strolled up behind him. She was tall with a boyish figure and brown hair that grazed the shoulders of her camel-colored cashmere coat. Her eyes radiated boredom. She scanned the lobby while Anthony spoke to me. “Everything still set for me to make the launch announcement in the booth? I heard there was some confusion.”
“Oh,” I said, swallowing my stomach. It was physically impossible to say no to this man, and I wasn’t even going to try. Gus could duke it out with him later. “
Yes, we’re all set.”
“Great,” Anthony said with a twinkle. “Where do we go now?”
“This way.” I walked them to the VIP check-in desk and introduced them to the receptionist. Then I went back to look for the pill again.
The bellman soon spotted it next to one of the charcoal gray rugs. I picked it up, blew the dust off of it, and carried it up to Gus’s penthouse suite.
33
Gus emerged from the elevator wearing a gold shirt that reflected the light as he passed through the lobby. Apparently the hotel’s guest services manager had unconventional taste.
“Look, King Midas is coming to dinner,” Lauren said.
The others turned to look.
Max cracked up. “He looks like a go-go dancer at Studio 54. Now I feel underdressed.”
Gus reached the group, and everyone went silent.
“What?” he said, scanning our faces.
I loaded them all into the van that would take them to a swanky Paris restaurant for dinner, and wondered, as it pulled away, when I would be the one in that van, a legitimate part of the group, going out for a nice evening while someone else stayed behind and attended to all the details. And, if I was a legitimate part of the group, would I know I was? Lauren and Max and Gus and Anthony all seemed surprisingly blasé about their status. When it was my turn, would I feel the thorough satisfaction of having conquered mediocrity, or would it all feel as bland to me as it seemed to feel to them?
A few minutes later, Celeste’s voice spoke calmly through the earpiece of my phone. “We have a problem,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I tripped on a puddle of water at the top of some stairs and twisted my ankle. I think it might be broken.”
“Is this a joke?” I asked. “You don’t sound like you have a broken ankle; you sound normal.”
“Will you believe me if I start screaming? My fucking ankle is broken.”
I gulped down a breath. “Shit, Celeste. Where are you?”
“I’m still at the bottom of the stairs in the conference hall. I crawled over to a chair. Can you take me to the hospital?”
“Um, okay let me think for a second.”
I scanned the lobby for Darren, who was sitting at a table flipping through a binder and making notes. A few heads turned to watch as I sprinted in his direction.
“Can you help me with something?” I huffed, holding my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “Celeste is hurt.”
“Sure,” Darren said, standing.
I nodded a thanks as he closed the binder and shoved it into The Backpack. “Hang on, Celeste. We’ll be there in a minute.”
Celeste had rolled her foot inward and the right side of her ankle was baseball-sized, rapidly accumulating a leeching purple bruise. It made me nauseous to look at it. Celeste’s eyes were moist and she winced when we moved her, but otherwise she was her usual self. Like ducks on a pond we were, kicking and kicking below the surface, but perfectly composed on top. Darren and I got her into the back seat of a taxi. I hopped in the front seat, and Darren shuffled back across the street to our hotel.
The waiting room of the Hôpital du Perray was a circus sideshow of dislocated shoulders, uncontrollable vomiting, forehead gashes, fractured wrists turned inside out, old people turning blue on gurneys. I wondered at the bizarreness of being there, of going from a place full of people fighting to get the best hotel room rate, to a place full of people fighting for their lives. For a moment the launch and France and all that was important to me seemed absurdly trivial. I wanted my friend back.
“I’m so sorry, Celeste,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “You were right about everything. So much has happened . . . it should have been you here instead of me. You would have done it better.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.
“I just wanted to say—”
“Stop, Halley.” She stared daggers at me. “Stop thinking about yourself for one minute. I’m in an emergency room in France with a broken ankle, and this is the moment you choose to unload your guilty conscience on me? I can’t talk about this right now. I don’t want to talk to anyone right now about anything.”
“Okay,” I said, running her words through my head. Would I ever be able to fix this? Was it really selfish of me to want to? I had so much to say, not because I wanted to unload my guilty conscience but because I wanted Celeste to know that I loved her. I needed her to know that, even if we could never go back to being friends again.
“Why don’t you just leave?” she said.
I looked up. “What?”
The guy behind me laboriously dry-heaved, and I prayed to God he would stop.
“Go back to the hotel. I’d rather do this on my own.”
“No way,” I said, glancing over my shoulder.
“Seriously,” Celeste said, grabbing her purse from my grasp and wincing from the movement. “I want you to go.”
I snatched the purse back and held it on my lap. “I’m not leaving you here, Celeste,” I said. If I couldn’t apologize and I couldn’t talk to her, at least I could sit beside her and hold her stuff.
We sat there for a long time without speaking, listening to the puker.
Eventually Celeste was wheeled through the double doors and back to a bed. They took X-rays and determined she had a fracture and a torn ligament, but it would heal without surgery. She was wheeled back out a few hours later with a blue cast on her leg, a prescription for crutches and pain medicine, and a bill for four hundred Euro, which I paid for out of my cash reserves. It was four o’clock in the morning when a taxi delivered us back to the hotel. I had just enough time to get Celeste up to her room and take a shower before I needed to be back downstairs to get ready for the sales meeting.
34
Lauren was a nervous wreck, but she tried to hide it. Revealing her anxiety might tip everyone off to the fact that Darren had actually done most of her work for her, that she was taking credit for authoring the contents of a program about which she had only scant secondhand knowledge. She’d studied the plans and reviewed the materials, but Darren had written the curriculum. Darren had drafted the training booklets and sent them for translation. Darren had designed the activities and hands-on sessions. Darren had researched precisely the number of times to reinforce the Tantalus selling points to ensure maximum retention. Darren knew that program inside and out. I think we both secretly hoped Lauren would bomb it, at the same time that we hoped all our months of work would not be wasted on a shoddy performance.
Marion spent the morning handing out welcome packets at the hospitality desk while I stood in the back of the meeting room watching the sound check and talking the presenters through the agenda. We practiced the transitions between presentations and decided what times we would release everyone for breaks. And when I came back out to check on the hospitality desk, there was Celeste, doped up, trying to explain to Marion and Grace the difference between American crutches and French crutches.
“These crutches look like polio sticks,” she said.
They stared at her blankly.
“Here, see, Halley will tell you. Halley, don’t you think these crutches look like the ones Forrest Gump had?”
“Are you sure Forrest Gump had crutches?” I replied.
“Don’t you remember that movie?” Celeste said.
“I think he had leg braces,” I said. “But I know what you mean.”
“I was telling Marion that the crutches we have in the States go under your arm pit.”
Marion explained that the armpit kind are old-fashioned and made reference to the wooden one used by Tiny Tim.
“What are you even doing down here, Celeste?” I asked. “You should be in bed.”
“I know, I was bored,” she said. “I feel okay if I take enough pills. Give me something to do.”
I studied her for signs of agitation, but she looked pretty relaxed.
“Okay,” I said. “Anthony is getting ready to open the sales meeting and you know how he doesn’t like it when people walk in and out of the room. You want to guard the door?”
“Yep.” She pushed herself upright.
“If anyone comes out, just don’t let them back in until Anthony’s done. He’s on the agenda for twenty minutes but you know how he is.”
Celeste crutched her way over to the door and stood like a linebacker on one foot, balanced on her polio sticks. If someone really wanted to get past her, all they’d have had to do was snatch one of the crutches and make a run for it and she’d have toppled right over. That reality didn’t make Celeste any less menacing though.
We should have known that Lauren’s presentation would be flawless. In the battle between image and substance, image would win a thousand times. Image was the thing we would protect at all costs. No one had any idea that Lauren hadn’t been the architect of such a perfect performance. She had probably been practicing for days. After several minutes of applause, company executives could be heard murmuring about how pleased they were with her; how the training was the heart of the launch, how the curriculum, the training booklets, the activities and hands-on sessions, the reinforcement of the selling points, were all so ingeniously planned and executed, how Lauren was a superstar. No one, least of all Lauren herself, mentioned Darren’s name as he sat in the back of the room, a spectator just like everyone else. The slate was wiped clean of him, and at the end of the meeting Lauren would be offered the management position of her choice.
DEVO started the following day. The conference hall was packed with people, branded name badges hanging on branded lanyards and branded DEVO bags full of branded product ads. You could tell the important people because they had “Guest Speaker” ribbons affixed to their badges; they nodded to one another as they rushed from one industry meeting to the next. The plebs made their way from booth to booth in search of free food.
The Insatiables Page 21