The Glitch_A Novel

by Elisabeth Cohen

  “So we have nothing to worry about,” Brad said. I sensed a glimmer of aggression in the way he said it.

  I nodded enthusiastically. “Exactly.” I noticed a shadow fall across his face. Brad resumed calculating on his calculator. Or maybe he just turns it upside down and types out the word “SHELLS”; that’s what I used to like to do.

  The rest of the board seemed satisfied, but Brad’s reaction left me on edge. The meeting adjourned, a word I always enjoy for the door-spring action contained in the hinge between the d and j and also because it induces a temporary, pungent southern accent in Brad as he says it. (“This meeting is now ad-journed.”)

  One by one the board members left, slinging their backpacks and bags over their shoulders. A few lingered, chatting with Cullen. They aren’t as chatty with me. The handshakes I got were springier, faster, and less grippy. I maintain broad and deep relationships with this array of influencers, but sometimes I get the feeling they don’t like me much. The room emptied; Cullen accepted an invitation to go out that never quite filtered my way. Brad stayed behind, as if waiting for a chance to talk to me.

  Willow came in looking like she’d been asleep at her desk. Her dress—it was odd, she was always wearing dresses—was wrinkled. “Is it OK if I take the sandwiches?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to want them, do you?”

  She hesitated. “My roommates would.” She rushed to correct herself. “I’ll put them in the microkitchen for tomorrow.”

  “Just take them home if you want,” I said. Willow had ordered them from a different place than usual. Sometimes risk pays off; it tends not to with catering orders. The turkey sandwiches had an unappetizing smear of pulverized avocado staining the upper roll. (A sad misuse of resources: avocado’s strength is its texture.)

  “I’ll order from the other place next time!” she apologized, flushing. The other place also has a ridiculously good pasta salad.

  “It’s good to try new things,” I said, trying to soften the unintended harshness with which my words had come out. It wasn’t Willow I was upset with.

  The mention of roommates had been a sliver of light onto Willow’s life; I never thought about her life outside Conch. I used to try to acquire three key details about my assistant that I could leverage in my holiday cards and future job recommendations, but there have been so many assistants. Now the personal lives of all the assistants plait together into a welter of colleges, unlikely double-majors, first jobs, sisters in Reno; it’s simpler to imagine them as solid all the way through, like corn husk dolls.

  Then Willow left, and Brad and I were alone. He walked out with me. Even though I got a sinking feeling when I saw his name in my inbox or voicemail, I usually liked talking with Brad while it was happening, even when he was pressing me hard. I felt like Brad and I communicated on our own special frequency, two people who were not frightened or turned off by each other’s intensity. He did not even try to be boisterous and glib with me—“brotastic” was how one of my assistants once described him—and I felt like this was a mark of how close we were. But as soon as we were alone, my fear of having disappointed him was confirmed.

  “Shelley, mind if we talk freely?”

  My stomach dropped. “Of course, I welcome it.”

  “Something’s wrong.” He touched my arm. “You’re not yourself.”

  I felt what I think of as the dark star in my chest—a tight, electric feeling on the left side, a concentrated ache, like a cold sparkler turning under my breastbone. I know it’s not a heart attack because I have it so often and yet I am still here. So it’s benign, I guess: just stress. I forced a smile and shook off his hand, sympathy being the last, unbearable straw. “I’m the same as always,” I said sharply, though I didn’t like saying this. I’m proud of my commitment to continuous improvement and lifelong learning.

  “Is something going on?” His tone, concerned, caught me off guard. He squinted at me. “Are you plotting your exit? Because your contract…” His voice rose, trying to sound fierce. It didn’t work; it’s not that kind of voice. But he doesn’t have to be fierce. We both know he could get rid of me if he wanted.

  “I promise you, I’m not. I’m as committed as ever.”

  “So don’t take this the wrong way but…are you all right?” The flicker of worry again. “Are you talking to people about other jobs? Are you bailing?” A pause. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  I took a step back. “Pardon me?” His eyes slid down my body. I pulled up my shoulders and sucked in my stomach, which is, as a matter of record, quite flat.

  “Is that it? Seriously? Wow. I guess I have a good eye. Congratulations. The timing couldn’t be worse, but—”

  “I’m not pregnant.”

  “You want to make sure? I have one of those drugstore testers in my car. Long story.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. When I started out at my first job, the payment processor, there was a blow-up doll stuffed into the supply closet where people, by which I mean mostly young women admins, went to get pens. It was there the whole time I worked there, gradually deflating over my two-year period of employment, its facial expression, never very nuanced, collapsing into a leer. A surprise every time you opened the door. The guy who had put it there was, amazingly enough, our in-house attorney. I’m sure he thought it was funny. He was generally regarded as a good lawyer. He helped me get my next job. You had to take the bad with the good, that was the lesson I took with me. You couldn’t let it get to you.

  “What is it, then? I can help you.”

  I looked down at the carpet and swallowed, hard.

  “Babe, I don’t judge,” Brad said. “You and Cullen? You have an attractive offer elsewhere? Marriage problems? You fucked up? We can sort it out, but I need you to tell me what’s going on.”

  I didn’t say anything. He was getting annoyed that I wouldn’t confide in him. “I’m not going to be an asshole and ask if it’s menopause.” Charming smile held for two beats. “Is that what it is?”

  I smirked to show that he was kidding, even though he may or may not have known he was kidding. I blinked very fast to keep a neutral expression. “Our valuation is up. Revenue’s good. SportConch is very promising. I don’t see why you’re so concerned about me personally.” I laid my hand on his shoulder. “I am as capable as I ever was.” As soon as I said it, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. There are certain things that, once you say them, suggest the possibility of the opposite. I am as capable as I ever was. It made it sound like maybe I never had been good. I let the words hang in the air. Brad went quiet.

  “You can do this,” he said, doubtfully, not with the direct, specific, clear coaching you give to a mentee, but the way you cheer along someone you don’t yet have enough documentation to fire. “I know you have it in you. I fought for you. I said, she’s got the stuff. You can fight your way out of this, but I need you to fight. There are a lot of other guys who would like your job.” He halted. “When I say guys I also mean women.”

  “Understood.”

  “You’re replaceable. I’m not saying that to threaten you. It’s just life.”

  I shrugged. I got it.

  “I need you to get the Powerplex deal done. Don’t let one bad news story stand in the way of a huge win for us. Do what it takes to get Powerplex.”

  I pushed back. “But we haven’t finished our due diligence. I’m still taking meetings with a couple other players in the energy harvesting space. I don’t want to rush into something with Powerplex if—”

  “Listen, I’m going to give it to you straight: if you don’t close the Powerplex deal, you’re out. Get it done or we fire you.” We exchanged extremely intense eye contact. “I need you to be the person I thought you were.” His voice dropped and became pleading, almost tender. “Don’t screw this up for me.”

  “I hear you loud and clear,” I said. But when I took a step forward the floor did not meet my foot at the instant I was expecting, and came up at me
too soon, and I felt a hot pain around my knee. Brad offered his arm but I waved it away. I didn’t want to give him any evidence I was old and weak. I winced all the way to the car.

  I drove myself home with a twinge in my knee, dazed. The kids were in bed. The maid had put all of the lights downstairs on low, and I could hear Bach’s Partita in A Minor, its alive flute, coming from Blazer’s nursery. I dropped my bag in my office and went into the kitchen to see about a snack. I was sniffling. The seed of a headache was taking root behind my right temple. At least I had all this—my family and the house, warm, comfortable, magazine-worthy. A top performer like me spends seventy-five percent of her life at work, but even so there is satisfaction in having a home life, especially when work is not going so well. It would have been nice, though, right at that moment, if someone had been there to greet me.

  The house was dim and quiet. All around was evidence of life lived—toys arranged in signifying ways, a board game still out in the family room, some neatly stacked plates in the sink, a spray of fine crumbs on the table, remnants of a meal I had not been present for. I had the sense I sometimes had at home, of admiring aimlessness: very nice, but what is one to do here? Sometimes my employees talk about their “real lives” and I find the concept, and more significantly their preference for it, perplexing. Things had happened while I was gone, of course—the house, while neat and orderly, still made that clear. Atop a bench was a clean, folded stray diaper; some tiny shoes with knotted laces lay near the back door. I don’t ever think about what I’m missing at home; why would I, when there’s so much that I am gaining at work? Still, my gaze rested on the shoes, the way one lay on top of the other’s toe, conveying the diffidence of their small owner, asleep upstairs, who relied on me to provide all of this.

  When I first had a baby, I thought it was wonderful that Nova was such a poor sleeper. It seemed so perfect and efficient—success at work during the day and into the evening, quality time with the baby interspersed throughout the night. It was exhausting, of course, but for a few weeks I felt a manic adrenaline, as nights dissolved into days and days into nights and I was present for every single bit of it, the 360 of human and corporate experience. I even suggested to Melissa (whom I didn’t know well yet—hard to believe!) that it would be convenient to have a nocturnal daughter. Melissa said no, sorry, we won’t be doing that. At the time I was stung (why wasn’t she considering my input?), but it was just as well. The tiredness had begun to hit. I had begun to fray.

  And so they were on regular child schedules, and now they were deeply asleep, upstairs in their nightlit rooms. Rafe was out with a client. Blazer’s night nurse dozed on his daybed, and Jacqui, in her room at the top of the back stairs, watched television. If I went into the back hall behind the children’s rooms I might see the thin bar of blue light under her door, the sole evidence that I was not the only person here awake, but I knew that if she heard my footsteps approaching, that bar of light would go dark. Not until she’d heard me go all the way back down the hall would she turn it back on.

  I switched on a cone of light in the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator. It was bright inside and stacked with containers. I opened one, but I wasn’t sure what it was, or who it belonged to.

  If I had no job at Conch, what would that be like? I tried to visualize it. I would wake up in the morning with only my personal email inbox to get on top of. How would I fill the baggy days? I could finally get to the symphony, awesome, but what then? Going to a party, crowding around some other female tech exec, the hot ticket of the moment, hearing her crystal laugh, straining to listen as she talked about her weekend on Larry Ellison’s yacht and her merger opportunity and her winking allusions to goings-on—an acquisition, perhaps—she wasn’t quite allowed to say. I tried to imagine, at this same gathering, a crowd of C-level executives bragging about their companies and asking me what I was doing. What would I say: “I’ve decided to spend some time with my family”? Could I say it in a way that they would believe? Would they even be polite enough to pretend to my face that they believed me? I could see their faked sympathy—they’d have read every detail online—and their deceitful smiles as they tried to pretend they didn’t know, and talked about what a brave and exciting choice I had made. Choice—right. They weren’t fools, these people.

  What kind of job could I get, if I lost this one? Nothing like my current gig. Some smaller company maybe. Or medium-sized but in a downward spiral. A game maker whose hit game had peaked. A toilet company out to manufacture smart toilets. “New challenges”: what a noxious phrase. Maybe I’d need to take some time to regroup and fake a passion project. I would have to be my own turnaround coach. My sinuses were filling up again and some kind of snotty water was collecting in the corners of my eyes and wetting my cheeks. Everyone wanted to see me fail, even the people who wanted me to succeed. Just for the spectacle of it, the story, the mild human interest of a human losing her grip. Just to watch me suffer through a power breakfast with Brad, and break down when he reassured me about how happy I was going to be at the smart toilet company.

  I peeled off my work clothes, yanked off my bra, and put on a Giants T-shirt of Rafe’s as a nightshirt. Downstairs, I made myself a sandwich. We did not have any of the products I wanted, not the right mayonnaise nor turkey nor the bread in the bag with the red label. I don’t do the grocery shopping, obviously. I don’t plan to start, but you’d think they could sometimes ask me what I want. The sandwich I constructed was a sad little affair, like something you’d get at a third-tier airport on a Sunday morning while everyone else is celebrating Christmas. It made the meeting sandwiches look deluxe. I took a bite and threw it away. I opened the refrigerator and got out the milk to make hot chocolate. A cup of hot chocolate, in an attractive mug, would be comforting. I could take it upstairs, crawl under the sheets, and console myself with optimistic revenue forecasts. It would settle me. But there was no cocoa in the cupboard. There were bottles of mineral water, a six-pack of coconut water pods, pasta made of lentils, lentils not made into pasta, cans of tuna, sacks of farro, unopened containers of sriracha and balsamic vinegar and za’atar, but no cocoa and none of the salty crackers I like. Petty frustration flared. Why couldn’t Jacqui keep the pantry stocked? This was a simple issue of inventory. It was logistically untaxing, and yet it happened all the time. I couldn’t manage the house the way I managed work—I didn’t spend enough time with boots on the ground; I could not, despite everything, do it all. You can’t yell at people at home the way you can people at work, and by that I mean reprimand them constructively and make them accountable with a well-structured performance improvement plan. They don’t respond right. They quit, or hide your favorite dress, or teach your children to hate you, or storm off in a tiff to go sleep in the guest room. There was a creak from somewhere in the wall as ice cubes heaved out of their mold into a bin. The kitchen was dark. The gasp of a faucet somewhere in the house turning off.

  I opened my laptop and tried to work. On the Conch homepage was a video of me. I clicked it idly and realized a few seconds in that it was my Barcelona speech. I watched it, feeling low.

  Onscreen, I strode onstage. In my head, when I enter, I take them all in with a wide-angle gaze and this is what I think to myself: hello, bastards! But I think it feeling superior to the bastards, not the way I felt right now. I tried to look for the moment I was thinking it, hoping to see everything extraneous fall away and an ascendant, radiant focus shine from my eyes. It was not quite that dramatic, however. I studied my image, shot from just below the lip of the stage. My posture could be improved. I found myself disliking myself. On the laugh lines, I gave away my pleasure that they had taken the bait; I pressed my lips together to repress a smile, a tell. I wouldn’t do that anymore. It was a good exercise to review all this. I should do it periodically, provided anyone continued to want me to make speeches at conferences. There were a decent number of views, likes, and shares on the video, and it repelled me that people had done that. I ha
ted it, and also the part of myself that wished the numbers were higher. There was some redness at my jawline where I had squeezed at an incipient zit in the greenroom, getting nervous. A failure of self-discipline.

  In the video, my belt buckle glinted in the footlights as I made dynamic but tasteful pelvic thrusts. I’d been taught to use hand gestures (“Make them bigger than you think, and slower,” says my guru, Greer) but couldn’t do the ones she’d taught me convincingly. The screen mounted behind me showed a close-up of my head.

  Watching myself, not as myself but as a woman in gray pants and a cashmere boatneck sweater twiddling a remote and making big arm-sweeps meant to signal the far reaches of her vision, I saw myself get excited, because I do deeply enjoy it and that comes through, even when I’m speaking from a canned presentation. It was obviously me and yet there was the sensation of being surprised, and perhaps, truthfully, a bit disappointed by myself—these long arms, these choppy gestures, the swell of my ass, the slightly crooked posture, the stupid superficialities. I didn’t look like the self I had in mind when I went out there. I seemed a little more disjointed and frayed. You’re never as good as you think you are.

  One of the things you learn as you go along, one of the interesting revelations of adulthood, is that what you think is attractive in yourself is often not the attractive thing. Maybe Conch had hired me in part because I was a woman. Or worse, maybe they’d hired me because they’d thought I’d be a weak CEO and they wanted that.

  Maybe that was what I was turning out to be.

  I looked flawed. Sometimes the flaw is what draws you in and serves as a kind of door you can go through. When I met Rafael he had a yellow tooth, revealed only when he raised his upper lip into his fullest smile. Rather than find the yellow tooth revolting, I liked it. It was like a little surprise, a vulnerability he showed only to those whose company he enjoyed most. I took it as evidence of his authenticity. It hinted at the textured life he had had, his range. I found it endearing. In my head he reminded me of an ear of maize, and the nice festive feeling you get from seeing those around Thanksgiving. But it also made him seem gettable. At some point it stopped being so attractive to me and became a flaw that I found ever-so-slightly off-putting—that’s the second lesson, that the thing that attracts you often becomes, down the road, the thing that repels you. Another example of this is our attempted acquisition of a digital asset management software company. We were attracted by their asset-sharing component and wanted to do the deal, but once they let us look at the back end we were put off by the patent-infringement issues and the unscalable platform. In Rafael’s case, the fonder I got of him the more secondary and irrelevant the tooth became, until it shifted from positive to neutral to negative, though I would never have brought it up. It was noted in a Businessweek profile of me (“with a yellowed glint to his smile that evokes the difficult road his family has traveled”), which neither of us commented on, and then a few months later he had it veneered. I told him there was no need, nobody noticed it, well, not anyone who already knew him, but I didn’t miss it. Although when I look back at the old photos, I do, a little. Though I also find it a little unpolished and can’t believe that it was once a benefit for me—or rather, I miss the old Rafael, the one I fell in love with, even though I love his successor.