The Narcissism of Small Differences

by Michael Zadoorian

  He leaned toward her. "Busy time, my ass. It was never this busy before."

  Ana threw the afghan off her legs and pushed it onto the other end of the couch. "What do you know about any of this? This is the first steady job you've ever had and you're ready to bail, I can tell."

  He hated when she thought she was reading his mind. "I am not."

  "Yes you are."

  He stood up. "I'm tired of this conversation. I'm going to read in bed."

  "Why don't you go do that? I'm tired of listening to you bitch at me. Good night. I'll be up when I've had a chance to decompress." Ana unmuted the television midcommercial, and the sound of someone talking about toaster pastries cut through the room.

  No you won't, thought Joe. And it was all he could do to keep from saying it out loud, but he was tired of fighting now. He stepped over to her, thinking that he might kiss her, then thought better of it. Instead he just said, "Good night."

  Ana didn't look back up.

  18

  Knowing Your Enemy

  The next night, when Ana found out she had to work late again, she decided not to worry about it. She simply texted Working 2nite to Joe's cell. It was the way to do it with the least amount of explanation and interaction. If he didn't like it, too bad. She was tired of his constant whining about her job. This was definitely not her ideal situation, but she was determined to keep her job and did not need him hounding her about it.

  Tonight, they had to stay late to work on ideas for WomanLyfe. Thankfully, Bruce had told them not to worry about shoehorning the teachings of Christ into the creative, which made things considerably easier. Ana had also decided, and told herself repeatedly, that WomanLyfe was simply another one of the many weight-loss programs out there for women, just more comprehensive. Not only did they sell prepackaged nutritionally balanced frozen meals, but they also had a network of hundreds of franchised strip-mall fitness centers where women could complete a thirty-minute exercise circuit. It was a good, inexpensive workout, with aerobic, cardio, and weight training, all in a half hour.

  Ana had even tried it herself and liked it. Okay, the truth was that both she and Adrienne had been forced to join WomanLyfe. On the positive side, she was actually exercising more than she had in years. Maybe she didn't exactly fit in at her local WomanLyfe center, since the crowd there was not what you would find at your typical health club, but that was what was good about the place. The women there were not Lycra-clad gym bunnies cruising for a health club hookup, but hard-working, unglamorous women wearing sweats and actually sweating in them. They were there doing the work, trying to be healthier, and she admired them for it.

  Even Ana had to admit that it was all very well thought out, and aside from the Christian stuff sprinkled throughout (a tiny quote from Scripture on the back of chicken parmesan rigatoni?), it actually seemed like an effective way to get in shape. The fitness centers also sold books of daily affirmations and music CDs (a kind of Christian-lite, quasi-new-age music that Joe would have despised) to "strengthen the mind and spirit." It was all very positive, and surprisingly helpful, even to a heathen like Ana. She could see why women liked this program. Anything that promoted women joining together for the purpose of becoming healthier and happier had to be a good thing. Which allowed Ana to start feeling better about WomanLyfe. Until.

  "Uh-oh," said Adrienne, perched in her usual place on the lime-green love seat that Ana had liberated from a retired SVP's office.

  "Uh-oh what?"

  Adrienne peered over her laptop. "Uh-oh, I just happened to find something about the intrepid founder of WomanLyfe. Some behind-the-scenes dude named Barry Jameson."

  Ana was at her desk, half hidden behind her own laptop. "Gee, a man. Quelle surprise," she said, not looking up. "Because who would ever expect a woman to be running a company that makes products for women? That would be crazy."

  Adrienne's eyes skittered from her Mac to Ana, then back again. "You ain't gonna like this one bit, my dear."

  It was not a big surprise that Adrienne had found something bad. Ana just wasn't sure that she wanted to hear it. "I thought we had decided to stop finding reasons to hate WomanLyfe and just try to be happy that we have jobs."

  "I know, I know. I'm sorry. You're right. What's the point? We made our deal with the devil."

  "Exactly. You can't just take a tiny sip of the Kool-Aid."

  "Absolutely," said Adrienne, nodding resignedly. "Drink deep or taste not the corporate spring."

  Ana was going to say something else, but then just sighed. "I guess you better show me."

  "That's not a good idea."

  "You know I have one of them computin' machines too. I could just use me the Google."

  "Well, he's everything we feared he was, Ana. A real piece of evil. Money from the company goes to all the awfulest, craziest right-to-life organizations—even those crazy fucks who picket the funerals of dead soldiers."

  "Jesus Christ," said Ana. "Wait, that's a weird thing to say. Sorry."

  Adrienne snorted. "Take His name in vain all you want, lady. I don't care. My Jesus likes swearing. It's like a shout-out to Him."

  "It's not funny. I was just starting to be able to rationalize all this. At least Karin, a woman, is in charge of the account. At least WomanLyfe is good for women. Helping them to become stronger and healthier—"

  "While funding maniacs."

  Ana shook her head and sighed again. "This is hard to ignore."

  Adrienne fingered a lock of auburn hair. "Yeah. Even for me. And I'm very good at ignoring."

  Ana felt nauseous. How could she keep doing this? How were they supposed to come up with ideas to sell this stuff when she couldn't even stomach the idea of what they did? She had to talk to Bruce.

  For now, rather than continue working, they decided to go out for a much-needed glass of wine. Since the agency was located in one of the many generic suburbs that surrounded Detroit, they ended up at TGI Fridays. Ana hated chain restaurants, but neither of them felt like driving far, so it was either that or go home. And she didn't feel like going home yet. She didn't know if it was because Joe was right about all this—her being miserable about WomanLyfe, having more responsibility than she really wanted, feeling trapped by her job—or if it was something else. All she knew was that she didn't want to start the argument again. She was going to have a drink with Adrienne, try to relax, and hope that Joe would be asleep when she got home.

  * * *

  Adrienne took a long sip of her Shiraz. "That's nice," she said, setting down the glass. She leaned forward, rested her elbows on the table, and clutched each forearm. "So I didn't tell you. I nosed around to see if I could get to the bottom of this whole rumor business."

  Upon hearing this, Ana felt yet another wave of nausea. So much for relaxing. "Oh god. What did you do?"

  Adrienne puckered her lips, cocked her head, splayed the fingers of both hands in front of her like she was throwing some secret suburban white-girl gang signs. "I flew some heads, called in some markers, spoke to my sources on the street," she said in a Joisey accent that made absolutely no sense but was still funny.

  Ana smiled through her queasiness. "I see. You have a Huggy Bear at the agency?"

  "Exactly. An informant. My snitch."

  "Let me guess. They think it's me sleeping with Bruce, right?"

  Adrienne looked surprised and impressed. "How did you know?"

  "I don't know. Something that shit Jerrod said made me realize it."

  "Hmph. He doesn't have a chance to get with megahetero Bruce, so he's got to be all like that?"

  "Did you find out who started it?"

  "No, not really. Huggy Bear didn't come through with that information."

  Ana took a sip of wine. It was spicy and lemony, and normally this would have made her very happy, but tonight it did not agree with what was going on in her stomach. "There's got to be some reason why this would happen."

  Adrienne ran a finger along the rim of her glass, making a
n irritating high-pitched noise. "Probably not super surprising that they would think that."

  Ana put down her glass. "And why is that?"

  "I don't know. I've seen the way he looks at you."

  "You have? He looks at me?"

  Adrienne nodded gravely. "Oh yes. He's totally crushing on you."

  Ana swallowed. "Yeah, sure."

  "I'm telling you. He looks at you. When you're not looking, of course."

  "Shut up."

  "Hmm, I can't decide exactly what it is. Let's say it's part objectifying male gaze eye-banging with a side of boy who's lost his puppy. Sort of moony-eyed, little-boy lust."

  "Ew, gross."

  "I don't know how you manage to be so oblivious to it."

  Ana thought about the night in LA in his hotel room. How he had looked at her then. "Why didn't you tell me all this earlier?"

  "I don't know. I guess I thought it would freak you out or something."

  "Yeah, well, you're right. It does."

  * * *

  When Ana got home, Joe was in bed with a copy of The Wicked Pavilion tented over his chest. She warmed at the sight of him there. It was nice to see him without having to listen to him. Ana picked up the book and leaned down to give him a kiss on the forehead, but before she could, he shifted and farted in his sleep. She stopped herself, placed his bookmark on the appropriate page, took off his glasses, put them on the nightstand with his book, then turned off the light and headed into the bathroom to wash up.

  Ana was still buzzing from what Adrienne had told her, about Bruce crushing on her. She thought about how even as she was telling Adrienne that she was freaked out by it, she really wasn't. Hearing it actually made her feel good, better than anything had in quite awhile. She had sensed that Bruce had a little thing for her and she had ignored it. She would continue to do so. And while it was always nice to hear that you had an admirer, there was no need to get all schoolgirl giddy about it. The captain of the football team likes me!

  Yet she liked hearing someone else acknowledge it. Was she that pathetic and needy? The truth was, Ana had learned a long time ago that certain types of conventionally attractive males like Bruce did not tend to go for gawky, bookish, bespectacled women like her, and she had always been fine with that. In high school, the kind of guy she usually attracted was someone not all that attractive to her. Vaguely good-natured, humorless boys who tended to talk too much about themselves (not uncommon for any of them), who weren't full-fledged jocks but played team sports, often not particularly well. They were nice enough, but she had not really cared much for them. They were the sensible boys who would become insurance agents, muffler shop managers, stalwarts of suburban communities. The sad thing was, she had gone out with those boys, they had even been her boyfriends and lovers, simply because they liked her and she had felt indifferent enough about herself to think that she didn't deserve anything better.

  Then she had gone to art school and everything kind of swung the other way. She studied art history, she drew and painted, and suddenly she got a better glimpse of the woman she was and who she could become. She discovered artistic, interesting, funny, weird, crazy boys. She actually liked those boys and they actually liked her. She went to raves and parties and danced all night at the Leidernacht and fucked pretty much whomever she felt like fucking. Art school was everyone's chance to do just that.

  Then came advertising, and then Joe, whom she now saw as a kind of amalgam of all those boys, somewhere in between the sensible and the wild. And the fact that now someone like Bruce was attracted to her? What did that say about her? What did it say about who she was now, who she was becoming? Was she changing in some way that she hadn't even realized? It scared her to think about it.

  And was it just her, or did Adrienne seem upset about this whole thing?

  * * *

  The first thing Ana did when she arrived at work the next day was talk to Bruce's administrative assistant to get on his calendar. She had planned for Adrienne to join her, but had forgotten that she was at the studio doing steam-cleaner radio for Fanning.

  When Ana walked into his office at 12:45, Bruce was eating lunch, a falafel from Sheesh. He had a container of hummus and a baggie of wedged pita in front of him as well.

  He took a bite of his falafel. "Sorry to eat in front of you, Ana, but this is my only chance. I've got a meeting at one and I'm starving." He pushed the hummus and pita across the desk at her. "Help yourself."

  Ana wasn't feeling hungry. Three glasses of wine on an empty, queasy stomach last night had pretty much done her in for today. The smell of garlic in the office was almost more than she could take. She was starting to sit down on one of the Bertoia chairs that faced his desk, then stood back up and closed the door behind her, knowing it would only set tongues to wagging. She didn't care.

  "Closed door? Uh-oh."

  Ana nodded as she scooted the chair closer to his glass desk and sat down. "Yeah. Uh-oh."

  Bruce looked as though he'd been expecting this. He set down his falafel, wiped his mouth, glanced at his computer screen for a moment, and exhaled loudly. Steeled, he looked up at her. "Okay, let's have it."

  "WomanLyfe is really bothering me. Have you researched them at all?"

  "Yeah, I have."

  "It's not good, Bruce. The guy that owns it? He, like, funds—"

  "Terrorists?"

  "No." Ana gave him an annoyed look, thinking that he was kidding around, but then realized that he wasn't. "Oh. Well, yeah."

  He started wiping his fingers. "This is not as bad as you think. They don't really fund that really horrible group. The—"

  "The 'God hates queers' group?"

  "Yeah, them. That's just Internet bullshit, started by someone."

  "Some pro-choice organization, say?"

  Bruce picked up his falafel, stared at it, then put it down again. "Who knows? Some irate blogger. Those guys can put anything they want out there. What are you saying, Ana? Are you going to quit on me?" He looked vulnerable, as if he had really lost his puppy the night before.

  "I don't want to quit, Bruce. I actually like my job, but I'm starting not to see any other choice. What's with us? Between these guys and Parnoc Industries, I don't know what's happening to this agency. Are we that desperate?"

  Bruce held up his index finger and thumb an inch apart. "We've only got a tiny piece of Parnoc. It's interactive and you'll never have to work on it."

  "Yeah, because I don't do interactive. If they decided to do, say, print directed to women, I guess I probably would have to work on it, wouldn't I?"

  "That's never going to happen, Ana."

  "Until they roll out Spring-Fresh Napalm or Lady Landmines or something equally vile. You didn't answer my question. Why are we so desperate?"

  "I wouldn't call it desperate. But things are not great. And you know Edward. He doesn't care about political stuff. A client is a client to him."

  Ana thought about Edward, which she did not like to do. He was an old-school ad guy, a remnant of the last days of advertising excess of the eighties, where everyone was still drinking a lot, but also snorting cocaine like it was going out of style, which it was. He was bloated, florid, with a spare tire of crimson flesh around the perpetually tight white collar that led up to his massive, balding, sun-damaged cranium. Adrienne referred to him as the Big Red Guy. He was once photographed for the cover of Adweek in his Armani with a giant Cohiba (the cliché!) and his foot up on the edge of his mahogany desk. When Ana saw it, she almost puked. He couldn't have made the agency look stodgier. Even his pose was offensive. Instead of the desk, Ana had pictured the entire staff under that Bruno Magli, all being crushed by the weight of his immense chateaubriand-engorged corpus. The word around the agency was that he was notoriously rude to restaurant waitstaff. She had heard a story about him screaming himself even redder in the face at some poor schlub who had dared bring him an eighteen-year-old single malt Scotch, instead of his customary twenty-five. As a former waitress, sh
e officially hated Edward's copious guts after that.

  "Isn't there something we can do?"

  "Ana," said Bruce, his voice growing gentler, "this is advertising. Sometimes we do work for products we don't believe in. I know you have. You probably don't use half the products or services of our clients, right?"

  "It's different, Bruce. Not choosing to use a particular type of vacuum cleaner is different than being against everything that vacuum cleaner stands for."

  Bruce shot her a hurt look. "So you're against vacuum cleaners now? Are you part of the whole hardwood-floor rebellion?"

  Ana didn't find what he said all that amusing, but she appreciated the effort. She put her elbow on his desk, laid her head on her palm, and sighed. "It's really not funny. I don't know what to do. This is bothering me. A lot."

  Bruce picked up a piece of pita and tore it in half. "I think you've trumped this whole thing way out of proportion. These people aren't that bad. Is their boss crazy? Yes, but whose isn't? They've got crazy Barry Jameson, we've got crazy Edward Cherkovski." He dipped the pita into the bowl of hummus and popped it into his mouth. After he swallowed, he said: "I think it would be a great idea if you met some of the people over at WomanLyfe."

  "Oh god. No." Ana leaned back from the desk. "Karin was enough."

  "Oh god yes, Ana. Excluding crazy Barry. Whom I've been told doesn't see anyone. I've never even met the guy, just his minions."

  Ana shook her head. "Bruce. No. Don't make me go."

  "Relax. Come on, you know how it is. Once you meet clients and get to see them as humans, it's much harder to hate them. That's the way it always is."

  "No it's not." She was trying not to whine, but not succeeding.

  "Once you get to know these guys, I think you'll feel better. They won't just be some faceless enemy. They're nice Midwestern people like us. Despite dropping her big ol' J-bomb into our meeting, Karin is actually very cool."

  Ana had to nod in agreement. "Yeah. Before she did that, I really did think she was okay."

  "See? In fact, I had a good talk with her this morning. We discussed the whole TV spots needing the teachings-of-Jesus thing."